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NEW AMSTERDAM 
AND ITS PEOPLE 



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NEW AMSTERDAM 

AND 

ITS PEOPLE 

Studies^ Social and Topographical, of the Towti 
wider Dutch and-Rarly E?iglish Rule 

BY 

J. H. INNES 

WITH MAPS, PLANS, VIKVVS, ETC, 



Maar gij, 6 wel, en alder-hf erlijks>t-Ldii.J, 
Weest daakbaar, an dts mi'Jcn Gevers hand. 
Die u als in een Lusc-hof hceft geplunt. 

Die gij u kJnd'ren 
Mviugt laten tot ten Ecuwig-eygendom, 
Tot dat hec Zaad der Vrouvve wcderotn 
Vcrschijn: tot ons verlosaing : Wcilckom! 

Wie zal 't hdin hina'itn? 

Jacob SxEtNUAM 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
1902 






f^ 



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Copyriq/i!, Tgo2, 
Bv Chaki 1.S Sckiunlr's Sons 

Publishn.1, October, i(y02 



A,. 



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UNIVERSITY PRi:SS • )OHt.' VVII.SOH 
AND SON • CAMBRIUCi:, U.S.A. 



PREFACE 



IT is perhaps unfortunate, in some respects, that Washing- 
ton Irving chose to employ his great talents in writing 
the amusing " Knickerbocker History " of New York. A 
burlesque history of New York does not seem to be called 
for per se, any more than a burlesque history of the Plymouth 
Colony, and the presentation of a fictitious type of the colo- 
nists of the former is calculated to work the same sort of 
inconveniences as would the selection, for example, of Colonel 
Pride or of Praise-God Barebones as a type of the latter. 
Readers of such works are supposed, it is true, to bear in 
mind the fact that they are considering the humorous descrip- 
tions of non-existent characters ; but when for any reason 
the work becomes almost a classic, as it were, of the literature 
of the country, the type therein portrayed passes insensibly 
in the popular mind into something like the embodiment of 
truth. 

The superficial American who travels in England, or the 
superficial Englishman who travels in America, when he 
writes a book about his travels, is apt to set forth the few 
people he has chanced to meet as representatives of national 
types of character. Both of these worthies are even more 
prone to do the same thing when they travel in a foreign 
country with the tongue of which they are of necessity but 
imperfectly acquainted, but in such cases their performances 
usually fall beneath the dignity of criticism. 

No community, however, can be rightly judged in this 
manner, for in each one are to be found traits of character 
almost as diverse and distinct as are the individuals who 
compose it. New York is no exception to this rule. Within 



vi PREFACE 

the period of the first thirty or forty years of the colonization 
of New Amsterdam there are to be met with, in the town, 
representatives of every country of Europe west of the line of 
the Slavonic peoples. The Dutch, of course, greatly predom- 
inated, but their characteristics also are exceedingly varied. 
In the public and private records of the colony there are to be 
found traits of profound and of thoughtless men, men crafty 
and men open-minded, mild or haughty, religious or profane, 
moral or immoral, learned or ignorant, freedom-loving or 
despotic, small-minded men in office, puffed up with notions 
of their boundless importance, men of shrewd business ca- 
pacity, and reckless speculators, — all very much as may be 
found upon the island of Manhattan in this year of grace 
nineteen hundred and two. About the only type which the 
author has been unable to meet with in his researches is 
the dunder-headed Dutchman of fictitious history and of his- 
torical fiction, — the embodiment of the popular idea of the 
Dutch phlegmatic temperament; a marvellous compound of 
Captain Bunsby and the Fat Boy in Pickwick. 

At a later period Mr. D. T. Valentine began the first really 
earnest and systematic attempt to bring out the actual features 
of the old Dutch establishment. The labors of this gen- 
tleman were severe, though not very methodical, and he is 
entitled to great credit for the mass of materials which he has 
brought together out of their original obscurity. Mr. Valen- 
tine, however, was not very well acquainted with the Dutch 
language, and, worse than that, he was peculiarly prone to 
giving fanciful explanations to imperfectly understood facts. 
These sometimes led to the most extraordinary and absurd 
conclusions. Thus, for example, when some years after the 
surrender to the English, the ferry-master at Haarlem discov- 
ered that he was being deprived of his legitimate fees by a 
practice which had grown up among the drovers of driving 
their horses and cattle through the woods to a ford across 
the narrow Spuyten Duyvil Creek, near the present King's 
Bridge, and there wading across at certain stages of the tide, 
he applied for permission to erect a tavern at this spot for the 



PEEFACE vii 

purpose of watching the wading-place. Mr. Valentine appears 
to have found a portion of the record granting the ferry- 
master the privilege of establishing the tavern at what is 
designated by the illiterate scribe as " the wedding-place," 
Thereupon Mr, Valentine has given a romantic account, to the 
effect that tliis paltry tavern, in its lonely and then almost 
inaccessible location in the wilderness, received its name 
from being the favorite resort of wedding parties from New 
Amsterdam. 

Again, in the case of Gerrit Hendricksen, who was famil- 
iarly called — in all probability from some peculiarity of his 
person or habitual dress — " de blauw boer,'^ literally, the blue 
boor or farmer, Mr. Valentine, having found certain deeds 
in which the property is described as adjoining "de blauw 
boer," has in some inexplicable manner translated the phrase 
as " The Blue Boar,'' and (perhaps with visions of the Boar's 
Head in Eastcheap in his mind) has gravely stated that the 
premises referred to were occupied as a tavern with the sign of 
the Blue Boar. 

Many other examples of Mr. Valentine's inaccuracies might 
be given, but the foregoing will suffice. They seem to have 
been very carefully followed in many instances by subsequent 
writers whose accounts are based upon his researches. Even 
in the case of so graceful a writer as the author of the " Tour 
around New York," his work is marred by numerous errors 
whenever he quits the domain of personal reminiscences. 

Since, then, Washington Irving has described New Amster- 
dam, not as it was ; and since Mr. Valentine has described it, 
in many respects as it was not, there seemed to be some room 
for an attempt to extract from the original records something 
which should more closely represent the actual conditions 
existing in the Dutch town, — whence the present essay. 

The work is mainly based upon topographical researches, 
the dangerous field of family genealogy having been avoided 
by the author as far as possible, except where it seemed 
necessary to introduce genealogical matter in order to eluci- 
date various portions of the text. 



viii PREFACE 

The especial acknowledgments of the author are due to 
Mr. W. Eames, Librarian of the Lenox Library, for many 
favors in the prosecution of his researches, and more particu- 
larly for placing at his service the extensive and very valuable 
Bancker Collection, so-called, of plans and surveys, in the 
possession of the Library. These, though only of indirect 
benefit to the author in the present work, are invaluable to 
the student of the topography of New York in the later 
Colonial period. 

So, too, the especial thanks of the author are owing to his 
friend, Mr. A. J. F. van Laer, Librarian of the Manuscript 
Department of the State Library at Albany, for the unwearied 
patience and courtesy with which he has met the author's 
somewhat large calls upon his time and attention, and for the 
valuable information received from him upon many points. 
The enthusiastic interest which this gentleman has shown in 
the history and antiquities of the offshoot from his native 
country, which, planted upon the island of Manhattan in the 
early portion of the seventeenth century, has grown from 
feeble beginnings till it is threatening to rob London itself of 
the municipal pre-eminence of the world, cannot but be grat- 
ifying to a native New York student of the history of the 
latter metropolis. 

J. H. I. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER I 

Page 
Early Growth ok the Settlement. — The Common Pasture 
Field. — Brugh Straet and Brouwer Straet. — Philip 
Geraerdy and the White Horse Tavern 1 

CHAPTER II 

WiNCKEL Straet, and the House of Dominie Bogardus. — 
The West India Company's Old Storehouse. — Schreyers 
Hoek 13 

CHAPTER III 

The West India Company and its Colonial Officers. — The 
Quarrel between Director Kieft and Dominie Bogardus. 
— The Wreck of the "Princess" 21 

CHAPTER IV 

"The Five Stone Houses." —The Brugh Steegh, or Bridge 
Lane. — The Brewery of the West India Company. — 

PlETER CORNELISSEN AND HIS GARDEN. — HeNDRICK KiP, 

The Tailor 31 

CHAPTER V 

Hendrick Kip and his House. — The Kip Cottages on Stone 
Street. — Jan Jansen van St. Obin and the Slave Ship 
"Gideon" 38 

CHAPTER VI 
The Water-side. — Dr. Hans Kiersted. — The Houses of 

CORNELIS VAN StEENWYCK AND JOHANNES NeVIUS. — CaP- 

tain Paulus Vandergrift. — The New Storehouse of 
the West India Company. — The Warehouse of Augus- 
tyn Heermans. — Secretary Van Tienhoven. — The Old 
Church and Parsonage 45 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER VII 

Page 

Adam Roelantsen, the First Schoolmaster in New Amster- 
dam, AND HIS House on Stone Street. — Captain Willem 
TOMASSEN 61 

CHAPTER VIII 

Surgeon Van der Bogaerdt and his House. — His Tragical 
Death. — The Privateer "La Garce" and her Prizes. — 
Isaac de Foreest 68 

CHAPTER IX 

The Van Cortlandt Homestead. — Catherine van Cort- 
landt and her Church at Sleepy Hollow. — Van Couwen- 
hoven's Houses on Stone Street. — Pieter Hartgers, 
THE Wampum Commissioner 75 

CHAPTER X 

The "Ditch," or Graft. — Teunis Craie and his Houses on 
THE Ditch. — The Jews in New Amsterdam. — Solomon 
La Chair, the Notary, and his Tavern. — The Banish- 
ment OF MiCHIEL PiCQUET 81 

CHAPTER XI 

CoRNELis Melyn, Patroon OF Staten Island. — The Indian 
Troubles. — Jochem Pietersen Kuyter. — The Struggles 
OF Melyn and Kuyter against the Colonial Authorities. 
— The Baron Van der Capellen. — Sibout Claesen, of 
HOORN 94 

CHAPTER XII 

Jacob Steendam, the Dutch Poet, and his House. — His 
Poetical Works. — "Den Distelvink." — Poems on New 
Netherland. — His Latter Years at Batavia .... 127 

CHAPTER XIII 

Jacob van Couwenhoven and his Brewery. — Prinse 
Straet, and "The Gardens." — Slyck Steegh, or Mill 
Lane. — The Bark Mill. — Dominie Michaelis and the 
First Dutch Church. — Evert Duyckink 144 



CONTENTS xi 

CHAPTER XIV 

Page 
The Houses of Barent Jansen, Jan Nagel, Claes Carsten- 

SEN, AND JOCHEM C ALDER. — PlETER AnDRIKSSEN AND HIS 

Troubles with the Indians. — Nicholas de Meyer. — 
Wessel Evertsen, the Fisherman. — Rut Jacobsen . . 161 

CHAPTER XV 

The "Great Tavern," afterwards the Town Hall. — 
Its Historical and Political Associations. — Dominie 
BoGARDUs's Party. — The Courts. — The Shirt Case. — 
Governor Lovelace's Tavern 175 

CHAPTER XVI 

The "English Quarter," and the Grants to Thomas 
Willet and to Richard Smith. — William Paterson, 
THE Scotchman, and his Adventures. — Who was he? — 
An Historical Problem 192 

CHAPTER XVII 

Hanover Square and Burger's Path. — Burger Jorissen, 
the Smith. — The Thirty Years' War. — Hendrick Jan- 
sen, the Tailor, and his Opinion of Director Kieft. 
— Smith Street 223 

CHAPTER XVIII 

Govert Loockermans and his Family. — Elsie Leisler. 
— The Loockermans' House and its Associations. — 
Captain Kidd 235 

CHAPTER XIX 

Sergeant Daniel Litscho and his Tavern. — Andries Joch- 
EMSEN. — The "Outhoek." — Wall Street and the 
Palisades of 1653. — Tymen Jansen, the Ship Carpenter, 
and his House 267 

CHAPTER XX 

The Smits Vly. — Hendrick Jansen's Grant. — Augustyn 
Heermans and his House. — Maryn Adriaensen and his 
Attack on Director Kieft 279 



xii CONTENTS 

CHAPTER XXI 

Page 
The Maagde Paetje, or Maiden Lane. — Skipper Cornelis- 

SEN. — Frederik Lubbertsen and his House. — Jan and 
Mary Peeck. — Sander Leendertsen's House. — Jan 
ViNJE, THE First White Child born in New Nether- 
land. — Vinje's Brewery 236 

CHAPTER XXII 

Secretary Van Tienhoven's Bouwery of " Wallenstein." 
— The Gouwenberg. — Van Tienhoven's Lane. — The 
Vanderclyff Family 309 

CHAPTER XXIII 

The Hamlet at the Ferry. — Lambert Moll. — Hage 
Bruynsen, the Swede. — Dirck Volckertsen and his 
Brother-in-Law, Abraham Verplanck. — Thomas Hall's 
Place 313 

CHAPTER XXIV 

The Town's End and Bestevaers Kreupelbosch. — Isaac 
Allerton and his Warehouse. — Loockermans' Farm. — 
The Ferry. — Harry Brazier's House. — Dirck, the 
Potter 329 

APPENDIX I 
The Justus Danckers View of New Amsterdam .... 347 

APPENDIX II 
The Descendants of Cornelis Melyn 350 

INDEX 357 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



View of New Amsterdam about 1650 Frontispiece 

(Reversed from a copy of the etching of Justus Danckers' Amster- 
dam, ill the author's possession.) 

Plan of New Amsterdam about 1644 To face page 1 

New Amsterdam about 1630 " 2 

(From the View in Hartgers' " Beschrijvingh van Virginia," 
Lenox Library, New York City.) 

Schreyers Hoek Toren, Amsterdam " 18 

(From Wagenaar's " Amsterdam.") 

The West India Company's House, Amsterdam . . " 22 

(From a print of 1693.) 

The West India Company's Warehouse " 24 

(From a print in the author's possession.) 

Plan of the Ground between Brugh Straet and the 

East River, New Amsterdam, in 1655 .... " 44 

Cornelis van Steenwyck " 48 

(From the portrait in Manual of the New York Common Coun- 
cil, 1864.) 

View of the Marckveldt and 't Water, 1652 ... " 58 
(Enlarged from the Justus Danckers and Visscher Views of New 
Amsterdam.) 

Plan of Brouwer Straet and Hoogh Straet from Fort 

Amsterdam to the Stadt Huys " 80 

View of the East River Shore in the vicinity of the 

"Graft," 1652 ** 104 

(Enlarged from the Justus Danckers and Visscher Views of New 
Amsterdam.) 

The Heere Graft, Amsterdam, 1795 " 122 

(From an aquatint engraving in Ireland's " Tour through Hol- 
land.") 

View of the Southeast Corner of Broad and Stone 

Streets " 124 



xiv LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

Jacob Steendam — The Kooman Portrait . . To face page 130 
(From a print in the Lenox Library, New York.) 

South William Street — The Ancient Slyck Steegh . "150 

View of the Oude Kerk, or Old Church, Amsterdam . " 156 
(From Wagenaar's "Amsterdam.") 

Stone Street " 170 

The Old Stadts Herbergh, or City Tavern, Amsterdam " 176 

(From Wagenaar's " Amsterdam.") 

Plan of the Stadt Huys, or Town Hall of New Am- 
sterdam " 178 

The Stadts Herbergh and vicinity, 1652 "182 

(Enlarged from the Justus Danckers and Visscher Views of New 
Amsterdam.) 

The Stadt Huys and Burgers Path, 1679 " 188 

(From the Danker and Sluyter View, Memoirs L. L Historical 
Society.) 

Coenties Alley " 192 

Portrait of William Paterson " 206 

(From a Wash drawing in the British Museum.) 

View of Old Slip " 222 

Hanover Square " 224 

Plan of New Amsterdam, from the Stadt Huys to the 

Town Palisades, 1655 " 240 

North Side of Wall Street " 272 

Plan of New Amsterdam, from the Palisades to the 

Ferry, 1655 " 278 

Augustyn Heermans " 282 

(From the Portrait b}' himself on his Map of Maryland, British 
Museum.) 

Looking up Maiden Lane from Pearl Street . ... " 296 

View of Gold Street " 298 

Intersection of John and Pearl Streets " 310 

A Part of Van Tienhoven's Lane, 1902 "312 

"The Swamp," 1902 "326 

AUerton's Warehouse and the Old Ferry, 1679 . . " 336 
(From the Danker and Sluyter View.) 



NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 



NEW AMSTERDA 
AND ITS PEOPLE 



CHAPTER I 

EARLY GROWTH OF THE SETTLEMENT. — THE COMMON 
PASTURE FIELD. —BRUGH STRAET AND BROUWER 
STRAET. — PHILIP GERAERDY AND THE WHITE HORSE 
TAVERN 

Nor you, ye proud, impute to these the fault. 

If mem'ry o'er their tomb uo trophies raise, 
Where through the loug-drawn aisle and fretted vault 

The pealing anthem swells the note of praise. 

Gray. 

THE city of New York has been fortunate in the pres- 
ervation of the early records of its settlement. The 
study of the beginnings of the great centres of population of 
the world possesses a peculiar interest for many, but the early 
history of some of these cities, such as Rome, London, and 
Paris, is lost in the obscurity of ages long past ; while others, 
such as St. Petersburg, and, to a certain extent, Berlin, built 
in pursuance of a rigid, pre-arranged plan of the governmental 
powers, possess no more of antiquarian interest than does the 
growth of New York under the Commissioners' plan of 1807. 
In New Amsterdam, however, the early growth of the town 
was not only in accordance with the process of natural accre- 
tion, but it was made under the auspices of the West India 
Company, a private corporation, which kept a rather jealous 
eye upon its officials and its colonists, and maintained a con- 
stant intercommunication with them, by means of reports, 
letters of instruction, and a system of records of even the 
most trivial transactions. These documents, though most of 

1 



2 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

the very earliest of tliem are supposed to have perished, are 
quite complete and full from the year 1638, and from them it 
is possible to gain a comprehensive view of New Amsterdam 
at almost any subsequent period during the Dutch rule. 

The early course of building at the new settlement is pretty 
well known. The original log blockhouse, with its surround- 
ing palisades, undoubtedly occupied a part of the site of the 
later Fort Amsterdam ; that is to say, it stood within the space 
embraced by the present Bowling Green, Whitehall, Bridge, 
and State streets. Clustering around this structure were the 
small cabins of the first settlers, most of whom were mere 
Indian traders. Many of these cabins were doubtless de- 
stroyed soon after the larger fortifications were " staked out," 
as it is expressed in a letter of 1626. The remainder of the 
thirty dwelling-houses which had been built before the close 
of that year were apparently scattered in the vicinity of the 
blockhouse, in such positions as had been chosen by the 
builders, no system of streets existing as yet, and the houses 
possibly not being considered as permanent. Afterwards, in 
a few instances these earhest settlers received grants of the 
plots which they had thus pre-empted, in this way causing 
some irregularity and inconvenience in the ground-plan sub- 
sequently adopted.^ These early cabins are said to have been 
" of bark." They were probably duly framed of hewn 
timber, but owing to the lack of saw-mills at this time had 
been covered, after the fashion of shingling, with the thick 
bark of the chestnut or of other suitable forest trees. The 
roofs were all thatched with the native reeds.^ 

^ See, however, the remarks in note, post, page 33, as to the indications of a 
system of streets ; or rather lanes, earlier than that finally adopted. 

2 It is the writer's opinion that the very valuable engraved view of New Am- 
sterdam, usually spoken of as the " Hartgers view," which is su))posed to be 
the earliest one extant of the settlement, is to be referred to the period above 
spoken of in the text, and may be fixed with comparative certainty to some time 
between the years 1628 and 1632, a date considerably earlier than is usually as- 
scribed to it. A slight examination of tiiis view by any person acquainted with 
the early topography of New Amsterdam \vU\ show that it is a reversed one, 
and as such must, in all probability, have been taken by means of a plain 
camera obscura, — no doubt from some point on the Long Island shore, — and 




5 









<1 &p 



THE COMPANY'S BOUWERYS 3 

Soon after the first body of agricultural settlers sent over 
by the West India Company had arrived, at about the period 
last mentioned, and after the Director, Peter Minuit, had 
efifected the purchase of Manhattan Island from the Indians, 
a body of negro slaves belonging to the Company was set to 
work clearing a large space of ground east of the present 
Bowery, and extending from a fresh-water swamp occup}^- 
ing the site of the present Roosevelt and James streets to 
Eighteenth or Twentieth Street. This tract was divided into 
six " bouwerys " or farms, which, with the buildings erected 
upon them by the West India Company, and with certain 
stock furnished by that body, were leased to various tenants. 

In addition to these farms, several clearings were begun by 
individuals, who were promised grants of land on favorable 

never restored to its true position. The correct view appears by simply holding 
a mirror to the reversed one. Having been obtained by this method, it is evident 
that the sketch must approach accuracy in its main details, subject, of course, to 
some impairment owing to the small scale upon which the picture is drawn. 
Examining it, now, closely, we find one of its principal features to be a row of 
stepped gables running parallel with the east side of the fort, and belonging to 
some buildings of more than ordinary size. These can be none other than the 
Company's "Stone Houses" upon Wiuckel Straet. Between them and the river 
shore no sign appears of the church, erected in 1633. A small cluster of cottages 
is seen upon the westerly side of the Broad Street swamp and its ditch ; another 
group near the inter.section of the present Beaver Street and Broadway ; and a 
few more near the windmill upon the North River shore. The buildings shown 
number about thirty or thirty-five. Upon the East River shore is shown the 
bluff, just west of which the City Tavern was erected in 1641 ; a thicket or grove 
upon its summit undoubtedly conceals from view a building of much interest, the 
old bark mill, in its isolated location east of the swamp or Blommaert's VI3', in 
the loft of wliich building the first church services were held. Most of these 
localities will be treated of more in detail in the text. As for the matter which 
seems to have .somewhat puzzled Mr. G. M. Asher in his " Essay on the Books 
and Pamphlets relating to New Netherland," — that no buildings are shown 
within the fort, the answer is that none were as yet built there ; and the main 
design of the view is evidently to show the newly planned fortification, as oriqi- 
naUy contemplated, for it will be noticed that the walls show embrasures, which, 
as far as we are informed, never existed there, the structure as finished being 
merely a sodded earthwork, upon which the guns were mounted en barbette. 
There is also a fifth bastion shown, upon the south side of the fort, of M'hich 
no mention is made in the records or in maps. It is not at all improbable that 
this view was originally annexed to a plan, or report of the engineer, to the West 
India Company. 



4 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

terms by the Company; while to aid in providing for the 
maintenance of its officials and servants of various degrees, 
the West India Company caused to be cleared and placed 
under cultivation the tract extending from Fulton to Cham- 
bers Street, and from Broadway to the North River, well 
known at first as the " Company's Bouwery ; " then, after 
the surrender, in 1664, as the "Duke's Farm," and the 
" King's Farm," by virtue of its confiscation to the Crown ; 
and later as the " Cliurcli Farm," the property of Trinity 
Church. 

The cleared land upon all these bouwerys, however, was 
immediately taken up for the cultivation of tobacco or grain, 
and no suitable pasture was found for the cattle. To remedy 
this, the Company cleared in part, and enclosed for a common 
pasture field, a tract of twenty -five or thirty acres, extending 
from the west side of Broadway to the present Nassau and 
Chatham streets, and from the line of Ann Street up to a 
small pond known as the " Little Kolck," near the present 
Duane Street.^ To this pasture field and to the Company's 
Farm a road extended from the fort, along the present Broad- 
way, then turning eastward and again northward, it skirted 
the common pasture field, following the lines of the present 
Ann, Nassau, and Chatham streets as far as a point about at 
tlie junction of North William and Chatham streets, where it 
deviated to the eastward for the purpose of going around the 
high ground known as Catiemut's Hill (this portion of the 
road has long been closed), after which it passed along 
the present Chatham Square and the Bowery, giving access to 
the farms already mentioned. After the lapse of many years, 
when the enclosure spoken of was no longer used for a com- 
mon pasture, and when the fences had been removed, the road 
naturally struck a diagonal line across the open space, thus 
marking out the present Park Row. The earlier route, as 
above mentioned, however, was in all probability the first 

^ There was, however, a temporary pasturage enclosure laid out at the time 
of the arrival of the first agricultural colonists. This, the well-kuowu Schaapen 
Weide, or Sheep Pasture, south of Wall Street, will be spoken of hereafter. 



FIRST SAW-J\IILL 5 

road of any considerable length on Manhattan Island,^ ante- 
dating by several years the river road along the upper portion 
of the present Pearl Street. 

Soon after 1626, the machinery for a saw-mill arrived from 
Holland. This mill, worked by wind-power, after the Holland 
fashion, was erected on the shore of Nutten, now Governor's 
Island, — a situation which will seem the less singular if one 
calls to mind not only the facilities for floating logs to the 
spot from the neighboring shores, but also the hundred acres 
and more on the island itself, overgrown with the forest of 
chestnut, oak, and hickory trees which had given the island 
its name. With the advent of this mill, of course, the build- 
ings of New Amsterdam began to assume a more finished 
appearance. Within a few years after 1633 they had extended 
easterly along the north side of Pearl Street (which here ran 
nearly along the shore of the river) almost as far as the pres- 
ent Broad Street, where at this time the tide ebbed and flowed 
through a small salt-water creek which received the drainage 
of a considerable area of wet land lying a short distance back 
from the river. Here a bridge was built, which afforded 
access to a few scattered houses along the shore beyond. 

As the importance of the settlement grew, the West India 
Company determined to provide more effectually for its pro- 
tection ; and the fort, laid out in 1628, according to the mili- 
tary science of the day, by an engineer sent from Holland, 
had been completed by the year 1635, together with the 
various offices of government which it contained. It was 
designed at first to surround the fort with a broad esplanade, 
but this plan was afterwards for various reasons abandoned ; 
while it was entertained, however, certain buildings of the 
West India Company were constructed east of the fort, to 
face the esplanade, and at a distance of nearly two hundred 
feet from the wall. These were a row of five stone houses 
containing various workshops of the Company, and will be 
spoken of more in detail hereafter; they played a most im- 
portant part in the topography of the rising town. When it 

^ See post, pages 152 and 271, as to the lane known as the Slyck Steegh. 



6 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

became desirable, a few years after the construction of these 
buildings, to lay out additional streets for the increasing pop- 
ulation, one street was laid out from the south end of this 
row of buildings towards the bridge at Broad Street before 
spoken of, and this received the name of Brugh Straet, or 
Bridge Street, its present designation ; while a parallel one 
from the north end of the row of shops, was called, from the 
West India Company's brewery, which stood upon it, by the 
name of Brouwer Straet, and when, a number of years after- 
wards, it was the first street in the town to be paved with 
cobblestones, it was called the Stony Street, and is to-day 
still known as Stone Street. 

In the mean time, while these changes were going on in 
the village, most of the available farming land in the lower 
half of Manhattan Island had been appropriated. A great 
deal of the territory, picturesque enough to the eye, offered 
few inducements to the Dutch farmers, who arrived in in- 
creasing numbers, — it was " scrubby," as they wrote home. 
Consequently, these began to turn their attention to the 
neighboring parts of New Jersey and of Long Island, where 
at Pavonia and Bergen, at Gouwanus and the Wallabout, 
and along the " Mespat Kill," — the present malodorous 
Newtown Creek, — and upon the East River shore, they 
settled along the edges of the marshes, "like frogs around 
a pond," as Pliny has it. These first settlements over the 
river were made about in the years 1636-40: a ferry now 
became desirable, and was probably started about this period, 
at a point where the river was narrowest, near the present 
Dover Street. To meet the travel from this ferry, a road was 
extended eastward till it came out upon the river shore near 
the present Hanover Square, and from that point it followed 
the water-side to the ferry. East of the present Broad 
Street, it became known as the Hoogh Straet, or High Street; 
along it and along the East River shore, houses began to 
spring up, and this part of the town became for a long time 
the principal seat of the social and business activity of the 
place. 



THE WHITE HORSE TAVERN 7 

By the year 1655, considerable attention had been paid to 
regulating the streets and removing encroachments, and New 
Amsterdam had begun to assume the appearance of a settled 
town. Selecting that period of time for a survey of some of 
the features of the Dutch settlement, let us take our station 
at the head of Brouwer, or Stone Street ; in front of us, across 
the Marckveldt, — later Whitehall Street, but now usually 
known as an extension of Broadway, — rise the sodded ram- 
parts of Fort Amsterdam, with one of its brass six-pounders 
trained directly down the narrow street. Inside the fort 
walls appears the broad stone back of the Governor's house, 
flanked by two great exterior chimneys at the ends ; and to 
the left or south of this, likewise within the fort, is the 
Dutch church with its steep double-gabled roof and low bel- 
fry. Beyond these buildings may perhaps be seen the tall 
flagstaff with the orange, white, and blue colors of the West 
India Company, and a glimpse may be caught likewise of the 
slowly revolving sails of the Company's grist-mill, on a little 
knoll outside the fort, on the site of the present Battery 
Park. Behind us, the unpaved street ^ slopes down towards 
a small bridge at the ditch, or graft, in what is now Broad 
Street; and at our right, upon the northeast corner of the 
street, is the White Horse Tavern of Philip Geraerdy. 

Just what induced Philip Gerard, as he called himself, or 
Geraerdy, as his Dutch neighbors called him, to quit Paris 
(for that was his native place), and to try his fortunes in the 
little village springing up around the fort at New Amster- 
dam, it is not easy to surmise. The Paris of the first half of 
the seventeenth century was, even more than the Paris of 
a century later, the centre of the political, literary, and social 
life of Europe ; and it is not to be supposed that the native 
Parisian of that time had greater predilections for the dull 
life of a colonist than the Parisians of later days. Cardinal 
Richelieu, the most subtle politician of that age, with his 

1 The residents of this street petitioned on the 15th of March, 1655, that they 
might be allowed to pave the street with cobblestones at their own expense, but 
no action was taken in the matter for a considerable period. 



8 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

tenacious purpose of humbling the House of Austria, had 
indeed recently thrown France (in alliance with Sweden), 
into the bloody struggle of the Thirty Years' War, which was 
then desolating Germany and the Flemish provinces : there 
was a constant demand for recruits for the French armies, 
and Philip was of the military age, — born about 1602, — 
and as the great French and Swedish generals of that day 
had the habit of very freely exposing their men to the enemy, 
Philip may have considered the somewhat monotonous ser- 
vice of the West India Company a refuge from the risks of 
that most bloody warfare, — as, in fact, did many others. 

However this may be, Philip Gerard and Marie Pollet, his 
wife, found their way to New Amsterdam prior to 1639, and 
soon established a small tavern — in fact, small enough to be 
sometimes designated a mere koek-huj^s, or cake-house — 
upon the corner of the Marckveldt and Brouwer Straet. 

The change which awaited Philip in quitting the French 
metropolis must have been a great one. There, all was bust- 
ling life, but surrounded everywhere by memorials of times 
long past : in the Rue St. Denis and in the Rue St. Jacques 
he must have often watched the crowds coming and going 
along those historic highways over which the traffic of nigh 
two thousand years had passed ; from the river-side, at the 
old palace of the Louvre, he had doubtless often viewed that 
scene, never to be forgotten, where between the ancient, over- 
hancrino- houses on both sides of the Seine, the isle of La Cite 
appeared, with its tall old mansions and sharp open point at 
the Place Dauphine, — like a vast galley in full sail down the 
river, the great bronze equestrian statue of Henri Quatre at its 
prow, and the heavy square towers of Notre Dame closing the 
view. From the same point too, as he looked southwards, he 
could see the tall graceful spire of Ste. Geneviev^e, where it 
marked the tomb of King Clovis ; and turning down the 
river he could watch, at his right, the gay throngs of the 
people of fashion in the garden of the Tuileries, or, across 
the river at his left, the frolicking, brawling, drinking, fight- 
ing, and love-making crowd of students of the University, in 



THE WHITE HORSE TAVERN 9 

the Pr^ aux Clercs, — likely enough he had mingled with the 
latter many a time. 

Now, however, in New Amsterdam, all his surroundings 
were new and humble: from the garden behind his tavern 
(which garden stretched in an irregularly shaped plot of 
nearly one hundred and fifty feet in length towards the centre 
of the present block, and together with the site of the tavern 
itself is at present covered by the massive pile of the Produce 
Exchange), he looked, in the first years of his residence here, 
down a low slope of open ground to a stretch of bogs and 
bushes extending northwards, with a little sluggish brook 
winding through it. This was Blommaerts Vly, called after 
two or three early settlers of that name ; it is now covered by 
Broad Street and its buildings. Encircling this marsh, the 
ground rose into low hills, in former years a common pasture 
ground for cattle, and afterwards a waste sjDot, where, between 
boulders and blackberry bushes, the negro slaves of the West 
India Company were allowed to cultivate for their own use 
little patches of Indian corn, beans, and other vegetables, till 
1638, when the land was leased by the Company for six years 
to Jan Damen, whose farm adjoined it, and who placed part 
of this ground, along Broadway, under cultivation, and used 
part as a sheep pasture. Between these enclosed fields of the 
company and the low hillock upon which Geraerdy's tavern 
stood, a small arm of the marsh extended westwards. This 
the Company had attempted to drain by constructing an open 
ditch along the line of the present Beaver Street ; and along 
this ditch two or three cottages were built: from Beaver 
Street down to Stone, along the present Broadway, were one 
or two more houses, and down Stone Street as many more ; 
these were all of Philip Geraerdy's immediate neighbors, 
when he built the White Horse tavern in 1641. The tavern 
was, as has been said, a small affair, — onl}^ eighteen by twenty- 
five feet in size, — and the carpenter who erected it estimated 
that seventy-five florins, or thirty to forty dollars of the 
present currency, would compensate him for his time. Its 
" one door and one window " opened into an apartment which 



10 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

was in all probability kitchen, dining-room, parlor, and tap- 
room, and its thatched roof was still in existence as late as 
1658. Philip's tavern connections were not, in fact, of the 
highest. The magnates of the city usually patronized the 
"City Tavern," on the water-side; the country people from 
across the Hudson River resorted to the tavern kept by Pieter 
Kock and Annetje his wife, on the opposite side of the 
Marckveldt, near where they landed their market boats ; and 
the Long Island farmers were in the habit of stopping at 
Sergeant Litschoe's tavern on the present Pearl Street. 
There remained, however, a considerable class to draw custom 
from, composed of the servants and " cadets " of the West 
India Company, from the adjacent fort, — bumptious young 
fellows from all parts of Northern Europe, who caroused and 
brawled at the tavern when off duty, and who not infrequently 
paid for their pranks by " riding the wooden horse," and by 
other military punishments. Here, too, when now and then a 
French privateer came into port, the French sailors were wont 
to resort, to negotiate for the discounting of their prize money, 
or for forwarding it home ; for Philip seems to have been a 
man of considerable business capacity, and besides his own 
language was acquainted with both Dutch and English, occa- 
sionally performing the duties of an interpreter. 

It was not all cakes and beer at the sign of the White 
Horse, however. In 1644, part of a shipment of wine, the 
whereabouts of which became a subject of investigation by 
the authorities, was shown to have found its way to Philip 
Geraerdy's cellar ; and here, too, men of more consideration 
than the general run of his customers occasionally resorted, 
such, for instance, as Jan Damen, the thrifty farmer just out of 
town, whose well-managed farm lay in part between the pres- 
ent Maiden Lane and Wall Street. Philip duly appreciated 
such clients, and when Jan Damen became unsteady upon his 
legs, would obligingly see him home when the road was dark. 
He did this upon one occasion, to his great inconvenience, as 
he tells. It was a very dark night in the spring of 1643, 
when they reached Jan Damen's farmhouse, not far from the 



THE WHITE HORSE TAVERN 11 

present Pine Street. That individual seems to have been in a 
rather quarrelsome mood, for Geraerdy had taken the precau- 
tion to draw his guest's sword from its scabbard and to carry 
it himself. At the house they found Jan Damen's serving- 
man in a very unamiable temper at being waked between twelve 
and one o'clock, and he threatened to shoot his employer, 
" Finally," says Philip, " the above Damen and his servant 
Dirck began to fight, the man having a knife, and Jan Damen 
a scabbard, over which Jan Damen fell backwards, deponent 
having his drawn sword in his hand for the purpose of separat- 
ing them. Jan Damen stood up and jumped into the house ; 
he returned immediately with a knife, and as it was very dark, 
Jan Damen struck deponent under the shoulder-blade," etc. — 
the surgeon declared it to be a pretty dangerous wound. 

The White Horse tavern appears to have been a pretty 
orderly place, upon the whole, but now and then an affray 
would occur there to enliven the town ; upon one of tliese 
occasions, the majesty of the Worshipful West India Company 
was seriously affronted in the person of Hendrick van Dyke, 
the ensign of its garrison, who was afterwards " fiscal," or 
prosecuting attorney of the colony. His assailant was an 
individual rather obscurely spoken of as " Black John," who, 
as it would seem from his remarks, had come from the seaport 
of Monnikendam, a few miles from Amsterdam on the Zuyder 
Zee. Surgeon Van der Bogaerdt of the Company describes 
the courtly flow of compliments between the actors in the 
affair, and its unexpected ending. He says that "being at the 
house of Philip Geraerdy, he heard Black John say to Ensign 
Van Dyk : ' Brother, my service to you ! ' to which the ensign 
answered, ' Brother, I thank you.' Instead of handing over 
the can. Black John struck the ensign with the can on the 
forehead, so that the blood flowed, saying that is his Monni- 
kendam fashion, and then threw the ensign over on his back ; 
— and all this happened without their having any dispute or 
words with each other." 

Philip Geraerdy throve in his calling, and within ten or 
twelve years from the erection of the little tavern upon the 



12 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

corner, he had built a new house for his own residence, in his 
garden, and some fifty or sixty feet down Stone Street.^ By 
that time, indeed, he may have rented out his tavern, for in 
1653, upon occasion of aiding in a loan to the magistrates 
to build the palisades at Wall Street, he is described as a 
" trader," — which usually indicated a person who was doing 
a little bartering with the Indians. He seems, moreover, to 
have turned his thoughts towards acquiring a bouwery upon 
Long Island, for in that same year 1653 he received (likely 
enough, in consideration for his loan) a grant of some fifty 
acres of fine woodland, sloping down gently to the shore of 
the East River, a short distance north of the present Astoria. 
His plans, whatever they may have been, were never real- 
ized, for he died in 1655. His widow soon married Matthew 
de Vos, a very respectable notary of the colony. Phihp left 
a young son, Jean or Jan Geraerdy, to whom his stepfather 
appears to have been a careful guardian. They resided for a 
number of years upon the premises in Stone Street, but after 
his mother's death, Jean Geraerdy sold the property, and in 
1676 appears, in an instrument then executed by him, to have 
been a resident of Rhode Island. Curiously enough, one may 
see his name, at the present day, in the Italianized form of 
Gerhardi, in immediate proximity to its original location in 
New Amsterdam. 

1 This building appears to have been of brick, and was apparently one of the 
best in New Amsterdam, for it was sold at public auction on the 9th of December, 
1672, to Captain Thomas Delavall, for 5195 florins, or about at the equivalent of 
$2100 of the present currency, — a large price considering the value of money 
at the time, and the ruling prices for real estate. Delavall soon sold the property 
to John Ryder, another Englishman, from whom it was purchased in 1680 by 
Frederick Phillipse, Lord of the Manor of Phillipsburgh in Westchester County, 
who owned much other property in this vicinity. The house was undoubtedly 
built about 1653, in which year Frans Jausen, the carpenter, sued Geraerdy for 
the work done, a claim which the latter resisted on the ground that the contract 
for work on the garret portion of the building "has been most scandalouslj 
fulfilled." 



CHAPTER II 

WINCKEL STRAET, AND THE HOUSE OF DOMINIE BOGAR- 
DUS. — THE WEST INDIA COMPANY'S STOREHOUSE.— 
SCHREYERS HOEK 

Wat bier leeft en oyt vergaderd 
Heeft zijn uur eu stervens-tijd : 
Wat hier (door verselling) naderd 
Ook een droevig-scheijdeu leijd : 
Wat iu vriendschap is verbonden, 
Door verkiesiiig, boven 't bleed 
Word te recbt wel uoyt geschonden ; 
t Bij-zijn nochtans breken moet. 

Jacob Steendam : "Deu Distelvink." 

THE lounger, smoking his pipe of a summer evening 
upon the wooden bench in front of the White Horse 
tavern, at the period of which we have been speaking, — 
about tlie year 1655, — looking across Brouwer or Stone 
Street, would have seen a row of five small houses, with 
their gable ends to the Marckveldt, or Whitehall Street, and 
occupying the entire front between Stone and Bridge streets, 
now covered by the Kemble Office building. These houses 
did not front upon the Marckveldt, but upon a small lane 
parallel with it, and only twenty-two feet in width, which 
was known as Winckel Straet. At the back of the houses 
were small gardens or enclosures, which opened out into the 
Marckveldt. These buildings seem to have been erected 
about the years 1645-46, and not improbably by the West 
India Company itself. Allusion has already been made to 
the Company's row of stone shops which extended from 
Stone to Bridge Street, and which was intended to face the 
broad esplanade of the fort. After the Indian troubles had 
broken out, in 1643, there was for a time a desire on the part 



14 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

of some of the colonists to acquire building sites under the 
immediate shelter of the fort; in order to accommodate 
them as far as possible, the Company, among various other 
provisions for their aid, determined to appropriate a portion 
of the esplanade for building purposes. The narrow Winckel 
Straet was therefore laid out along the front of the Com- 
pany's shops; and upon the west side of the new street or 
lane were built the houses referred to. 

At the period of our survey, the two northernmost of 
these houses were owned, as to the one next to Stone Street, 
by Hendrick Jansen, a baker; the other belonged to Maxi- 
milian van Geele, a merchant of Amsterdam, who seems to 
have used it as a temporary residence in the Colony. The 
two southernmost houses belonged, the one to a certain 
Caspar Stymetz (some years afterwards it became of in- 
terest as then belonging to the English Governor, Colonel 
Lovelace, and, as so belonging, having been plundered and 
confiscated by the Dutch when they recaptured New Am- 
sterdam in 1673); the house at the corner of Bridge Street 
was owned by an Englishman, George Holmes, the pro- 
prietor of the solitary tobacco farm at Deutel, or " Turtle " 
Bay, on the East River, who, like many others of the farmers 
at this time, had a residence within the town. 

The middle house of this row, however, is of more general 
interest, as having been the last place of residence in New 
Amsterdam of Dominie Everardus Bogardus, usually spoken 
of (though not with strict accuracy) as the first minister of 
the Dutch church at the settlement. 

It is the fortune of Dominie Bogardus that his name shines 
with a somewhat reflected lustre from that of his wife, 
Annetje Janse, of wide reputation, — the energetic lady from 
whom so large a portion of the population of New York and 
vicinity claims descent, as shown in the various Trinity 
Church litigations. 

From the upper windows of his house, looking out over 
the Marckveldt, Dominie Bogardus could probably have seen, 
across the southeastern bastion of Fort Amsterdam, the roof 



ANNETJE JANSE BOGARDUS 15 

of the cottage in Pearl Street of his respected mother-in-law, 
Catharine or "Tryn" Jonas. This lady had long occupied a 
responsible position under the West India Company, no less, 
in fact, than that of its official midwife, — the thrifty cor- 
poration going so far as to make this provision for the welfare 
of its colonists. Tryn Jonas was duly sensible of the dignity 
and importance of her office, which she exercised with great 
independence, even to the extent of refusing upon various 
occasions to attend certain of her patients with whose ante- 
cedents she was not satisfied. Her daughter Annetje was 
married, as early as 1626, and several years before leaving 
Holland, to Roeloff Jansen, who came from the valley of the 
Mouse, not far from where the crowded spires of Maestricht 
looked over the complicated girdle of bastions and ravelins 
and lunettes and hornworks which encompassed that famed 
fortress. 

Reaching the Colony in 1630, Roeloff Jansen and his wife 
repaired at first to Fort Orange, or Albany, where, in ad- 
dition to his employment as an agricultural foreman to the 
patroon Van Rensselaer, he appears to have entered upon a 
trading business with the Indians, and it was in the course 
of his expeditions in this latter capacity that his name was 
given to the beautiful stream in Columbia County, which 
still, between solitary overhanging woods, ripples as merrily 
over its thick bed of pebbles as when it was first named 
Roeloff Jansen's Kill. 

Prior to 1636, however, Roeloff Jansen had taken up his 
residence in New Amsterdam, and acquired a tract of about 
sixty acres along the North River, where it formed a sort of 
peninsula between the river and the swamps which then 
covered the sites of Canal Street and West Broadway. Here 
he had probably erected a small farmhouse upon a low hill 
near the river shore at about the present Jay Street; but he 
had hardly made a beginning in the work of getting his 
bouwery under cultivation when he died, leaving to his 
widow Annetje the arduous task of caring for a family of 
five small children, in a colony hardly settled as yet. 



16 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

In 1633, the Reverend Everardus Bogardus had been sent 
over to succeed the somewhat interrupted and broken min- 
istry of Dominie Jonas Michaelis. A new though rather 
homely church had been built for him upon the East River 
shore, or upon the present Pearl Street, between Whitehall 
and Broad streets, and adjoining it was the parsonage. The 
Dominie was an unmarried man, and lived in solitary st^te 
at tlie parsonage for several years, drawing his rations from 
the West India Company, like the rest of its officials and 
employes, — till 1638, when he married the widow Annetje 
Janse (or Roeloffse, as she is called, indifferently, following 
the Dutch fashion), after a marriage settlement which is 
still extant had been drawn up, providing for the securing 
to her first husband's children the sum of 200 guilders 
each. 

Thus, in addition to his clerical duties, the Dominie as- 
sumed the cares of a landed proprietor, not only with regard 
to the North River farm, — which soon became known as " the 
Dominie's Bouwery," — but also as to another and less con- 
venient tract which he and his wife had acquired. This was 
situated some three or four miles up the East River, where, 
at the mouth of the Mespat Kill, two or three low hillocks of 
ground rose out of the surrounding marshes, then much 
sought for on account of their supply of salt hay for the 
cattle. This tract, which covered about one hundred and 
thirty acres of upland and meadow, the Dominie had leased 
out as early as the summer of 16-42, though no house was 
erected upon it as yet. The locality, which, graded down to 
a few feet above the water level, is now occupied by the 
dismal suburb sometimes called Hunter's Point, soon acquired 
the name of "Dominie's Hoek," and has been constantly 
confounded by writers upon New Amsterdam with the North 
River bouwery, some of them going so far, in order to make 
it fit in with their theories, as to supply the name of Mespat 
Kill to the sluggish little rill flowing through the swamps 
along Canal Street. 

In the year 1642 it was determined to build a new and 



THE HOUSE OF DOMINIE BOGARDUS 17 

substantial church within the walls of the fort. The mo- 
tives for this change of location are undoubtedly to be found 
in the apprehension of Indian troubles, too well justified by 
the event. The new church proceeded rather slowly in 
building, but within two or three years services were held in 
it in its unfinished condition. The old church and the par- 
sonage were then converted to other uses, and Dominie 
Bogardus appears to have purchased for himself the new 
house on the Winckel S tract to which reference has been 
made. 

Here the Dominie spent the closing years of his ministry. 
His riding mare duly saddled and bridled, and brought down 
from the North River bouwery, where her pasturage was 
provided for with great care in the lease to the tenants, was 
probably a familiar sight in the Marckveldt, as she stood at 
her owner's back gate (just on the spot where the main 
entrance now is to the Kemble Building), waiting for him to 
set out on his pastoral visits about the town, and to a number 
of rude farmhouses in their half-cleared bouwerys, for two 
or three miles up the island. 

A good deal of the life of the little community centred 
around the house of Dominie Bogardus ; on the opposite side 
of the Winckel Straet was the noise and stir of the workmen 
in the Company's shops ; on the other side of his house was 
the Marckveldt, where the country people came with their 
butter and eggs and poultry and vegetables, and now and 
then an Indian was to be seen with game or fish. A little 
beyond, on the right, where Bowling Green now is, the sol- 
diers of the garrison held their drills, or lounged the time 
away on pleasant days when off duty. A little more than a 
block away, down the Marckveldt, to the left, was the shore 
of the East River and the small public dock with its crane 
for hoisting merchandise to or from the lighters, and, lying 
at anchor beyond, could generally be seen the vessels in 
port. 

Between the Dominie's house and the shore was a building 
which seems to have occupied most of the Marckveldt front 



18 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

on the east side, between Bridge and Pearl streets. This 
was the storehouse of the West India Company; its exact 
site is uncertain, but it must have stood upon ground now 
embraced in Whitehall Street, for in the grant, in 1646, by 
Director Kieft to Doctor Hans Kiersted, of the lot which is 
known to have been the present northeast corner of Pearl 
and Whitehall streets, it is described as having to the west 
"the Company's Warehouse on the Strand." The edifice 
can be readily distinguished in the Justus Danckers' View 
of New Amsterdam, forming the frontispiece of this work. 
A building for this purpose, and upon this site, was probably 
one of the earliest erected by the Company ; and as such a 
structure would naturally be of a substantial character, we 
are led to infer that the first building must have been burned 
or accidentally destroyed, for in a report made in 1638 it is 
stated that "the place where the public store stood can with 
difficulty be discovered." It must have been rebuilt soon after 
1638, however, for in 1640, many complaints of overcharges 
having been made by the people, the Council ordered that a 
board containing the prices current should be kept in a con- 
spicuous position at the store. This building, however, seems 
to have ceased to be used for store or warehouse purposes 
soon after the advent of Director-General Stuyvesant, when 
a new and larger structure appears to have been erected as a 
public store, or "pack-buys," — and used at the same time by 
the government as a custom-house. This latter building, of 
which further notice will be taken, ^ stood upon the north side 
of Pearl Street a short distance east of the old storehouse. 

The architecture of the old building was of the simplest 
character, and the purposes for which it was used in its later 
years are not known ; it was in all probability removed within 
a short period as an obstruction to the thoroughfare of the 
Marckveldt. 

To the right or west of the Marckveldt, and a short dis- 
tance beyond where it terminated upon the shore of the East 
River, was a low bank of land projecting out to a point the 

1 See page 52, post. 



SCHREYERS HOEK 19 

site of which is now in the Battery Park, a short distance 
north of the Staten Island Ferry-house. This was the 
Capske, — the "cape," or "point," — being the southern ter- 
mination of Manhattan Island; but it was more generally 
known in Dominie Bogardus's time as "Schreyers Hoek." 
The sojourner at Amsterdam, strolling down one of the lines 
of street bordering the broad stream of the Amstel as it winds 
through that city, comes out upon a point of land projecting 
a short distance into the harbor, at the right of the river's 
mouth. Near it stands a venerable old battlemented tower 
of stone, with its roof thrown up into a high conical peak of 
curious form. Here, in the seventeenth century, the Dutch 
emigrants and their families usually embarked in small boats 
to reach the East Indiamen or other vessels which lay in the 
harbor, a short distance out beyond the curving double line 
of " booms " near the shore. Here, too, their relatives and 
friends were wont to assemble to take their last leave of 
those who were bound for the uttermost parts of the globe, 

— for Ceylon and Batavia, for Brazil and New Netherland, 

— and whom in most cases they never expected to see again 
upon earth. From the natural scenes of grief displayed upon 
these occasions, the locality acquired the name of Schreyers 
Hoek, "the Weepers' Point," and the tower still retains the 
name of Schreyers Hoek Tooren. Amsterdam influences 
prevailed in New Netherland, and the point of land near the 
public dock, on which the people of New Amsterdam were 
accustomed to gather upon the important occasion of the 
sailing of a vessel for Holland, to wave their farewells to 
friends returning to the old country, naturally acquired the 
name of the similarly situated locality at Amsterdam, just 
referred to, and became known also as Schreyers Hoek. 

Upon this point of land was to have been seen, a short time 
prior to the period of our survey, in 1655, a deserted cabin, 
and near it, upon the shore, was drawn up a warped and 
decaying catboat. These were the property of one Thomas 
Baxter, an Englishman who, falling out with the Dutch 
authorities, had abandoned his possessions here and taken 



20 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

refuge in New England, where, upon occasion of the war 
between the English Commonwealth and the Netherlands in 
1653, he took out so-called letters of marque from the little 
Colony of Rhode Island, which asserted thus early its dignity. 
With a small armed vessel he pestered the Dutch greatly, 
and captured two or three of their ships. His property on 
the Schreyers Hoek was confiscated, and upon its site, 
greatly raised by filling in, was built Director-General 
Stuyvesant's residence, which afterwards became known as 
"The White Hall," part of the ground of which is now 
occupied by the large and somewhat antiquated-looking 
brick building at the corner of State and Whitehall streets. 
There are some reasons to suspect that this name was derived 
from the old palace of Whitehall at Westminster, at that 
time in its last days, and that it was given rather derisively 
by the English to Director-General Stuyvesant's not very 
imposing mansion. 



CHAPTER III 

THE WEST INDIA COMPANY AND ITS COLONIAL OFFI- 
CERS.— THE QUARREL BETWEEN DIRECTOR KIEFT AND 
DOMINIE BOGARDUS.— THE WRECK OF THE "PRINCESS" 

Who holds the reins upon you ? 

The latest gale set free. 
What meat is in your mangers ? 

The glut of all the sea. 
'Twixt tide and tide's returning 
Great store of newly dead, — 
The bones of those that faced us, 
And the hearts of those that fled. 

Kipling : " White Horses." 

NO sketch of Dominie Bogardus would be complete 
without some reference to the disputes between him 
and the Director Kieft, which occupied the closing years of 
the Dominie's ministry at New Amsterdam. 

The Dutch West India Company, which at one time gave 
promise of becoming one of the greatest trading corporations 
ever organized, — which as early as 1626 had a fleet of 
seventy-three vessels, many of them armed, at its disposal; 
and which claimed or actually occupied, not only the vast 
territories of Brazil, but immense tracts of land upon the 
coasts of Africa, besides New Netherland, and its possessions 
in the West Indies, — was frequently unfortunate in the 
administrative officers of its colonies. These men, usually 
advanced through various gradations from clerks' desks in 
the historic buildings upon the Haerlemmer Straet and on 
the Y-Graft, in Amsterdam, which were successively the head- 
quarters of the West India Company, were often entirely 
lacking in the qualities essential to a successful magistracy. 



22 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

Relieved from the personal supervision of the general officers 
of the Company, and with extensive powers conferred upon 
them over the new settlers, they became veritable Sancho 
Panzas in the colonies. Of these, perhaps the worst speci- 
men was Willem Kieft, Director-General at New Amsterdam 
from 1638 to 1647. 

It is somewhat difficult to describe the character of this 
man, or to decide which was its leading trait, — his hypoc- 
risy, his self-importance, his administrative incapacity, or the 
rancorous venom of his disposition towards his opponents. 
He had, in fact, all of the offensive qualities of his successor, 
Director Stuyvesant, without the tenacity of purpose and 
will of the latter. He was perhaps more thoroughly hated 
and despised by all classes of the community than any other 
inhabitant of New Netherland. Moreover, he was as sensi- 
tive to criticism upon his official acts as are most small-minded 
men placed in positions of considerable power, and, like such 
individuals, he was prone to look upon the least animadver- 
sion upon his conduct, or upon any doubts expressed in rela- 
tion to the wisdom of his administrative policy, as "treason" 
of the most glaring description. 

The motives which impelled Kieft to order the cruel mas- 
sacre of the Weckquaskeek Indians, in 1643, are not fully 
known, but seem to have been, in considerable measure, 
owing to a desire of obtaining easy possession of the lands 
occupied by them. That tribe, fleeing before a raid of their 
dreaded enemies, the Mohawks of the north, abandoned their 
village on the Hudson River near the present Hastings, in 
Westchester County, and came in the depth of winter to 
Manhattan Island, and to Pavonia on the west side of the 
Hudson River, where they encamped in a very destitute and 
starving condition. Their pitiable plight excited the com- 
miseration of many of the Dutch, who furnished them with 
food. Not so with Kieft, however; to him it appeared only 
as a good opportunity, prepared by Providence, to make the 
savages "wipe their chops," ^ — -as he feelingly expressed it, 
— to settle up old scores, and by exterminating the Indians 




o 



KIEFT'S INDIAN POLICY 23 

to facilitate the expansion of the Colony; and his famous 
order was issued accordingly : — 

" February 25th, 1643. We authorize Maryn Andriessen, 
at his request, with his associates to attack a party of savages 
skulking behind Corlaers Hook or plantation, and act with 
them in such a manner as they shall deem proper and the 
time and opportunity will permit. Sergeant Rodolf is com- 
manded to take a troop of soldiers and lead them to Pavonia, 
there to drive away and destroy the savages lying near Jan 
Evertsen's, but to spare as much as possible their wives and 
children and take them prisoners. Hans Stein, who is well 
acquainted with the haunts of the Indians, is to go with him. 
The exploit should be executed at night with the greatest 
caution and prudence. God bless the expedition! " 

Captain David de Vries, sitting by the fire in the Director's 
kitchen at the fort that cold winter's night, and anxiously 
awaiting the results of the "exploit," to which he was vio- 
lently opposed, tells the rest : — 

" At midnight I heard loud shrieks, and went out to the 
parapet of the fort and looked towards Pavonia. I saw 
nothing but the flashing of the guns. I heard no more the 
cries of the Indians." 

More than a hundred Indians — men, women, and chil- 
dren — were killed by these two parties; they were merely 
butchered in cold blood, for they were completely taken by 
surprise, — even to the extent of imagining at first that they 
were assailed by their enemies, the Mohawks ; and they made 
scarcely any resistance. "No barbarity," says Valentine, 
" was too shocking to be inflicted upon them. " 

The natural consequences of such an act a:, this followed 
swiftly. Most of the outlying farms around New Amster- 
dam were devastated, and the settlers slain or carried into 
captivity, by the enraged Indians, There were but few of 
the inhabitants of New Netherland who did not severely 
suffer, either directly or indirectly, by this foolhardy and 
cruel policy of Kieft, and he and his advisers were bitterly 
attacked by all classes of the community in consequence. 



24 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

Among the most outspoken of their antagonists was Dominie 
Bogardus, who, as Valentine says, "fulminated against 
them in the pulpit until he fairly drove them out of the 
congregation." 

There is considerable evidence that the Dominie was of a 
rather convivial disposition, though it is not to be believed 
that he was guilty of anything like the excesses with which 
Kieft afterwards charged him. It was at the wedding of 
Magdalena Verdon to Adam Brouwer, a young soldier from 
Cologne, in the employ of the West India Company, on 
March 21, 1645, that the Dominie made some public remarks 
of a rather personal nature respecting Kieft, which seem to 
have induced that individual to open fire, as it were, upon 
his reverend opponent. Two days afterwards, accordingly, 
he sent the clergyman what he calls " a Christian admonition," 
— which the latter declined to receive, and proceeded with 
his denunciations of Kieft and his policy. At last, on the 2d 
of January, 1646, Kieft issued his final and celebrated mani- 
festo, beginning in the imposing form : " In the name of the 
Lord, Amen ! The Honorable Director and Council, to the 
Reverend Everardus Bogardus, Minister of the Gospel in 
this place." Though couched in this official form, the whole 
proceeding is transparently the work of Kieft personally. 
As his grievances consisted, in large measure, in Dominie 
Bogardus 's public criticisms upon his administrative acts, he 
opens his manifesto, with fine relevancy, by attacking the 
Dominie's personal habits, critically distinguishing the acts 
which he had done, for the six or seven years preceding, 
when "pretty drunk," from those performed when "thor- 
oughly drunk." He then proceeds to animadvert upon 
Dominie Bogardus's conduct in regard to certain matters of 
church discipline, about which Kieft had as much concern as 
the drummer of the garrison. Gradually getting to the gist 
of the matter, he reminds the clergyman of his remarks in a 
sermon preached by him a short time before, in which he had 
alluded to certain monsters of the tropics, ■ — " but you know 
not, said you, from whence, in such a temperate clime as' 




111 






KIEFT'S MANIFESTO 25 

this, such monsters of men are produced. They are the 
mighty ones who place their confidence in men, and not in 
the Lord! Children might have told to whom you alluded." 
Having thus shown how aptly he felt these remarks, as well 
as certain others of which he complained, to have applied to 
himself, the Director proceeds to business : " All these things 
being regarded by us as having a tendency towards the 
general ruin of the country, both Church and State being 
endangered where the magistrate is despised, and it being 
considered that your duty and oath imperatively demand 
their proper maintenance ; whereas your conduct stirs up the 
people (already too much divided) to mutiny and rebellion, 
. . . our sacred duty demanded that we seek out a remedy 
against this evil ; and this remedy we now intend to employ, 
in virtue of our high commission from the Company, and we 
design to prosecute you in a court of justice ; and to do it in 
due form we made an order that a copy of these our delibera- 
tions should be delivered to you to answer in fourteen days, 
protesting that we intend to treat you with such Christian 
lenity as our conscience and the welfare of State and Church 
shall in any way permit." 

The papers presenting Dominie Bogardus's side of this 
controversy have all perished, but it is very evident that he 
stoutly maintained his ground, and goaded his small-minded 
antagonist into a state of fury with each successive rejoinder 
he made. He lost no time in replying to the document above 
set forth, by a conmiunication which Kieft characterized 
as "useless and absurd, as not answering in any respect the 
charges conveyed to said Bogardus on the 2d January, 1646. 
Wherefore it is decreed that said Bogardus shall, within the 
time limited, answer precisely the contents of that paper in 
an affirmative or negative manner, under penalty that action 
be taken against him as a rebel and contumax." 

Dominie Bogardus soon sent in a further reply to the 
Director which was still less to his liking than the former 
one, for upon the 18th of January, 1646, he caused an entry 
to be made in the Council Minutes, in which he characterized 



26 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

"a certain paper of Reverend Bogardus," sent to him by that 
gentleman through the court messenger, as " filled with use- 
less subterfuges, calumnies, and injuries, besides with a 
profanation of God's holy word, and designed to vilify His 
magistrates, of which said Reverend Bogardus, according to 
his custom, makes use to obscure the truth, and not at all 
answering our griefs and charges." 

This paper warfare of legal threats on the one hand, and 
of apparent denunciation and defiance on the other, was kept 
up for several months; Dominie Bogardus evidently deny- 
ing the jurisdiction of the Director and his Council to try the 
cause against him, and Kieft being apparently not sure of 
his ground, and living in the constant fear of afterclaps from 
the home government. In the mean time the Dominie was 
harassed by a sort of flank attack in the shape of a suit for 
slander brought against him by Oloff Stevensen van Cort- 
landt, a deacon of his church and a prominent citizen of New 
Amsterdam. This latter proceeding, however, was not so 
much the work of Oloff Stevensen as of Kieft himself, — 

" lago hurt him, 
lago set him ou," — 

and finally, by the mutual good offices of several of the 
leading men of the community, a reconciliation was brought 
about between the Dominie and his deacon. 

During the spring and summer of 1646, the Dominie and 
the Director- General, looking across the Marckveldt, might 
perhaps have often seen one another sitting at their open 
windows upon fine days, engaged in writing their mutual 
diatribes; but with the latter period came a change, for it 
was known then that Kieft's official days were numbered, 
and that a new Director and Council were to be appointed. 
The prosecution of Dominie Bogardus seems to have re- 
mained in abeyance for a time, and to have finally taken the 
form of charges preferred against him to the Classis of 
Amsterdam, but of their precise nature we are ignorant. 



THE SHIP "PRINCESS" 27 

The latter part of the summei of 1647 was a period of much 
activity in New Amsterdam. Out in the East River, a little 
way from the shore, the ship "Princess " lay at anchor, soon 
to sail for Amsterdam with a heavy passenger list. Kieft and 
one or two of his late advisers were to return to the Nether- 
lands with the formidable task before them of explaining to 
the Directors of the West India Company the justice and 
expediency of his recent measures with the Indians. He had 
succeeded, at the first coming of Director- General Stuyve- 
sant, in poisoning the mind of the latter against several of 
his, K left's, principal opponents, and two or three of them 
had been heavily fined and banished from the Colony ; in this 
number were Captain Jochem Pietersen Kuyter and Cornells 
Melyn, — two able and determined men, of whom further 
notice will be taken hereafter; they were now making ready 
for the voyage, with all their detestation of Kieft transferred 
to his successor, and fully prepared to renew the battle before 
the States-General. With them and in close sympathy, went 
Dominie Bogardus to meet Kieft's charges before the ecclesi- 
astical tribunal. Among the passengers, too, was Hendrick 
Jansen, a tailor, whose coarse but vigorous denunciations of 
Kieft had stirred up the latter to procure his banishment also. 
Besides these there were merchants and traders returning to 
buy goods at Amsterdam, among whom was Simon Dircksen 
Pos, one of the pioneer Indian traders in New Netherland. 
Several of the servants of the West India Company, whose 
terms of employment had expired, were also among the pas- 
sengers, as were also some of the colonists, who, their prop- 
erties having been destroyed during the Indian troubles, had 
given up the struggle and were now only anxious to get back 
with their families to the old country. 

Many of these passengers were intrusted with various 
commissions by their friends remaining behind, and the Sec- 
retary of the Colony was kept unusually busy in registering 
powers of attorney or " procurations " to collect debts, to 
receive legacies, to make purchases, to settle litigations, 
and to transact other similar business in various parts of 



28 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

Europe. Along the water-side the porters of the Company 
were actively employed in transferring bales of furs and of 
tobacco, with other articles of freight, from the Company's 
pack-huys, to the little dock near the foot of the present 
Whitehall Street, and thence by lighter to the "Princess." 
Among the articles shipped, too, was the wonderful white 
beaver-skin tipped with yellow; this sport of nature had 
been brought in by an Indian, and was now sent over to the 
Netherlands as an unheard of rarity. There was also Kieft's 
collection, made for the West India Company, of about a 
hundred specimens of the minerals of New Netherland, con- 
spicuous among which were the various pieces of pyrites 
which he had obtained to the west of Hudson River, and 
which he believed to contain gold. Much more valuable 
than these was a number of " ver}^ exact maps and accounts 
of New Netherland," which would have been now of almost 
priceless value. 

Finally, when the last chests and packages were shipped 
and the last passengers had gone on board, the ship's anchor 
was weighed amidst the ringing of the church bells and the 
firing of cannon from the fort ; the last farewells were waved 
between the passengers on the vessel and the crowd on 
Schreyers Hoek, and the "Princess" sailed down the harbor 
on the 17th of August, 1647, long watched from the shore 
as she receded through the heavily wooded shores of the 
Narrows. Many weeks passed before any further tidings of 
her reached New Amsterdam. 

On the southern coast of Wales, at the mouth of a broad 
valley sloping down from the " Black Mountains " of Breck- 
nock and Carmarthen shires, lies the old town of Swansea, 
upon what is thought by many to be the most beautiful spot 
upon the coast of the English island. Walter Savage Landor 
gave it the preference, in an artistic point of view, to the Bay 
of Naples. Here, looking seaward upon a fine day, over 
the steely-blue waters of the Bristol Channel, the Exmoor 
Hills, and beyond them the mountains of Devonshire are 
seen in the far distance across the broad estuary, where 



WRECK OF THE "PRINCESS" 29 

" Silent, majestical, and slow, 
The white ships hover to and fro, 
With all their ghostly sails unfurled, 
As beings from another world 

Haunt the dim confines of existence." 

From the town westward the shore of yellow sand curves in 
a bold, semicircular sweep, not unlike that of the Bay of 
Naples, and ends in the massive limestone rocks known as 
"The Mumbles," now crowned by a lighthouse of elegant 
form. Looking landwards, the valleys stretching inland are 
seen to be separated by massive spurs of the mountains of 
Wales, which terminate abruptly above the beach. Here, to 
many of the passengers and crew of the "Princess," was their 
journey's end, 

" And very sea-mark of their utmost sail." 

The captain of the vessel missed his reckoning in a violent 
September gale, and ran up the Bristol Channel. The ship 
was thrown upon the rocks near Swansea, and soon went to 
pieces; of about one hundred persons on board, eighty 
perished, among whom were Kieft and Dominie Bogardus, 
— all their dissensions being terminated by the Great 
Arbitrator. 

After the death of her husband. New Amsterdam seems 
to have become distasteful to Annetje Janse Bogardus, and 
about the end of 1647 she and her family removed to Fort 
Orange, or Albany, where she had spent some of her earlier 
years, and where she purchased a house and garden spot at 
the northeast corner of Middle Lane (now James Street), and 
Joncker or the present State Street; here she died in 1663. 
The Dominie's house on the Winckel S tract and the Marck- 
veldt in New Amsterdam was retained by his family for a 
number of years ; and about the period of our survey, in 1655, 
it seems to have been occupied by a tenant, Warner Wessells, 
a man of some prominence in the town who purchased it a 
year or two afterwards. The quiet street leading up the hill 
at Albany, upon which Annetje Bogardus dwelt, has now 



30 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

become a broad and busy thoroughfare, over which the 
crowds passing to and from the Capitol travel daily, and a 
bronze tablet upon the Mechanics and Farmers Savings Bank 
at that place marks the site of her house ; but nothing per- 
petuates the memory of the dwelling in New Amsterdam 
where she and her husband, calumniated and harassed by 
their malicious and unscrupulous enemy, passed many dark 
and stormy hours. ^ 

^ It is understood, however, that steps have been very recently taken towards 
having a commemorative tablet erected upon, or very near to, the site of Dominie 
Bogardus's house in Whitehall Street. 



CHAPTER IV 

''THE FIVE STONE HOUSES."— THE BRUGH STEEGH, OR 
BRIDGE LANE. — THE BREWERY OF THE WEST INDIA 
COMPANY. — PIE TER CORNELISSEN AND HIS GARDEN. 
— EENDRICK KIP, THE TAILOR 

ON the east side of the Winckel Straet, to which pre- 
vious reference has been made, stood five stone build- 
ings, of probably two or three stories in height. These are 
usually misnamed, by writers upon New Amsterdam, "The 
Company's Storehouses ; " they were, however, in no sense 
storehouses, except in so far as they may have served to store 
materials for the work which was carried on there. They 
were in fact used as workshops for the various branches of 
labor conducted under the direction of the officers of the West 
India Company, and seem to have contained the shops of the 
carpenter, the blacksmith, the cooper, and the armorer of the 
Company, with prolmbly others, such as those of the tailor, 
the shoemaker, the hatter, etc, for the garrison and for the 
other employ(is of that economical corporation, which aimed 
at supplying, through its own workmen, most of the wants 
of its servants. Perhaps the most singular appurtenance of 
the Five Houses was a goathouse in their rear, which was 
built in Director Van Twiller's time, as we are informed by 
an entry in the i-ecords, in 1689. 

Of the precise date of the erection of these buildings we 
are ignorant, but it must have been very early, for in 1638 
we are told that they were " in need of considerable repair." ^ 
After the surrender to the English, in 1664, the " Five 

^ These buildings are clearly distinguishable upon the " Hartgers View " of 
1628 or 1630, aud were probably then just erected. See ante, page 2, note. 



32 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

Houses " were confiscated as the property of the West India 
Company.^ Being no longer required for their original pur- 
poses, they were put to various uses by the English ; among 
others they were used for a time partly as officers' quarters, 
and partly as a hospital for the garrison ; but becoming dilap- 
idated, they were demolished about the year 1680, and the 
sites sold. The narrow Winckel Straet was then closed and 
granted to the owners of the private houses fronting upon it 
on the west, whose lots had previously been rather short 
in depth, and were now made to front upon Whitehall 
Street. The site of the Five Shops of the West India Com- 
pany is now covered, so far at least as the end towards Stone 

1 Immediately after the surrender to the English in 1664, an attachment was 
sued out against these houses upon an alleged cLaim against the West India 
Company by one George Baxter. Baxter was an Englishman of a rather tur- 
bulent disposition who had been for a number of years in the Company's ser- 
vice, and was a lieutenant under the notorious Captain John Underbill. As 
early as 1641, he had attempted to farm a tract upon Manhattan Island, embrac- 
ing the site of the present Bellevue Hospital, and forming a part of what was 
afterwards known as the Kip's Bay Farm. Subsequently he acquired a tract 
of land near Gravesend upon Long Island. He is understood to have been a 
brother of Thomas Baxter, whose difficulties with the Dutch Colonial administra- 
tion and the confiscation of whose property have been previously alluded to 
(ante, p. 19). Influenced by motives apparently not unconnected with his 
brother's misfortunes, George Baxter, in the beginning of 1655, was instrumental 
in stirring up considerable resistance to the Dutch authorities at Gravesend. 
He was promptly arrested and imprisoned at the Town Hall in New Amster- 
dam, but while thus in prison he prevailed upon one Thomas Greedy, a resident 
of the newly planted settlement of Middelburg (now Newtown) upon Long 
Island, to make an attempt, \vith the aid of a negro man, to drive away his 
(Baxter's) cattle, which had been seized by the Gravesend magistrates, and 
were in their custody. For this offence Greedy received a sentence of twelve 
years' banishment, and the property of Baxter was confiscated. Upon the sur- 
render in 1664, however, Baxter, evidently believing that the English day had 
come, presented a claim of 1278 florins against the Company for his losses, and 
attached their liouses as above stated. Cornelis van Ruyven, the former Secre- 
tary of the Colony, who had been appointed by Governor Nicoll a trustee or 
receiver of the West India Company's property, appeared before the magistrates, 
and recapitulated to them Baxter's doings of nearly ten years before. He was 
roughly interrupted several times by Baxter, who gave him the lie repeatedly in 
the presence of the court. The tribunal was not very sympathetic, for it not 
only fined Baxter for contempt of court, but appears to have taken no further 
notice of his proceedings. 



THE BRUGH STEEGH 3^ 

Street is concerned, by what is known as the "Merchants' 
Building." 

The land occupied by the West India Company's shops, 
between Stone and Bridge streets, seems to have been partly 
bounded upon the east by a narrow and obscure lane, known 
as the Br ugh Steegh, or "Bridge Lane," which was a cross- 
way to facilitate communication with the bridge over the 
small stream which ran through the present Broad Street, 
and which was probably in use before Brouwer or Stone 
Street was opened through ; it may indeed have been the 
remains of an earlier plan of streets than the one finally 
adopted, for there are evidences of its having extended 
through the present blocks as far north as Beaver Street, and 
through what was sometimes called the Church Lane (being 
a narrow passageway lying west of the first church building), 
south into Pearl Street/ This lane crossed the site now 
occupied by the building known as No. 6 on the south side 
of Stone Street, and bore off somewhat to the east as it 
approached Bridge Street. It was about twenty-two English 
feet in width. 

Upon the west side of this lane and extending to within a 
few feet of Bridge Street, stood a house used at one time ap- 
parently as the official residence of the officer known as the 
fiscal, or public prosecutor, of the colony. In 1647, it being 
then perhaps no longer used for such purposes, we find 

1 There are, in fact, certain obscure indications presented by the " Hartgers 
View," and by some of the early records, that the first village consisted of three 
narrow parallel lanes running north and south, and one — the so-called Beaver 
Path — running east and west. Of these lanes the easternmost appears to 
have been the Brugh Steegh ; the middle one seems to have occujiied the easterly 
portion of the present Whitehall Street and the Bowling Green, and to have 
been merely widened upon the west, and thrown into the later Marckveldt ; 
while the westernmost of the lanes, with the buildings upon it, would then have 
occupied the present Bowling Green, into wliich it would liave been thrown, and 
its buildings demolished at the time of the construction of the fort and its ap- 
proaches, 1628-35. As for the Beaver Path, there can be little doubt that it was 
originally a continuation to the North River sliore of the present Beaver Street, 
and was not, as has been claimed, the present Morris Street. The portion we.st 
of Broadway was closed and granted to private parties before 1650. 

3 



34 I^EW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

Director-General Stuyvesant recommending the establishment 
of a more permanent school than had hitherto existed, and 
that it should be kept " in the kitchen of the fiscal." After 
the opening of Stone Street, not long before the date last 
mentioned, the lane was no longer much needed for public 
use, and it appears to have fallen into the condition of a 
mere open passageway. It was not finally closed, however, 
till 1674, when with other public lands it was used to afford 
small building sites for several persons, whose houses had 
been demolished as being too near the fortifications. 

Just east of the Brugh Steegh stood the brewery of the 
West India Company, upon land now occupied in part by an 
engine-house of the New York Fire Department and in part 
by the building No. 10 Stone Street. This brewery must have 
been erected at a very early date, and undoubtedly gave to 
the street its original appellation of the " Brouwer's Straet." 
Valentine finds the derivation of the name of this street in 
the fact that Oloff Stevensen van Cortlandt, who resided 
upon the north side of the street, nearly opposite to this 
building, was himself at one time engaged in the business of 
brewing. It does not appear, however, from the early records 
that his brewery actually stood upon Stone Street ; it seems 
to have been rather upon the lane known as the Marckveldt 
Steegh, of which a fragment survives to-day as Marketfield 
Street ; at all events, the brewery of the West India Com- 
pany must have antedated Van Cortlandt's residence here by 
at least half a score of years. When Peter Stuyvesant was 
sent over as Director-General, in 1647, after the ruinous 
administration of Kieft, he saw that something must be done 
in the way of raising taxes from the people of New Amster- 
dam, so as to relieve the West India Company of part of the 
burden of maintaining the colony. He could think of no 
better device for this end than by enforcing a stringent 
excise tax upon wine and beer. In order to carry this out 
successfully, it would be desirable for the company to discon- 
tinue its own brewing operations, and to throw the business 
into the hands of private parties. This led, without doubt, to 



PIETER CORNELISSEN'S GARDEN 35 

the abandonment of the Company's brewery, and, in 1651, 
the ground is referred to as being " where the Company's 
brew-house formerly hath stood." That the building had 
then been demolished is not necessarily implied, and does not 
seem to have been the case, for on the rude plan of New 
York attached to the Nicoll Map, of about 1666, a building of 
more than ordinary size is shown as occupying this location. 

Upon a September day in the year 1637, the yacht " Dol- 
phin" lay at anchor near the mouth of the Texel. Here, 
amidst the crowd of Dutch men-of-war, or merchant vessels, 
East Indiamen, Baltic coasters, colliers from Newcastle, and 
fishing smacks from all parts of the North Sea, which filled 
that great commercial highway of the Netherlands, leading 
from the Zuyder Zee out into the German Ocean, the 
skipper of the " Dolphin " hailed his brother skipper of the 
" Herring." He was in very poor trim for an ocean voyage 
to New Amsterdam, to which port he was bound ; his vessel 
was leaking badly; he had no carpenter, and his crew 
stoutly refused to go to sea without one. Could the skipper of 
the " Herring " do anything for him ? On board of the " Her- 
ring " was a young carpenter named Pieter Cornelissen, whom 
the skipper of his vessel was able to spare ; and as he was 
willing to go, he embarked on board of the " Dolphin " and 
reached New Amsterdam in safety, after a perilous voyage in 
which most of the cargo was ruined. He never returned to 
Europe, but became a denizen of New Amsterdam. It was 
upon such slight accidental circumstances as these tliat 
many of the colonists came to America. 

At New Amsterdam, Cornelissen entered the service of the 
West India Company as a house carpenter, or " timmerman," 
and thus acquired the appellation which he retained the 
remainder of his life, of Pieter Cornelissen Timmerman. 
Looking about him for an available building spot in New 
Amsterdam, Pieter Cornelissen found, along the south side of 
the newly laid out Brouwer or Stone Street, a long, narrow 
strip of vacant ground, extending from the West India Com- 



86 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

pany's Brewery down to within thirty or forty feet of the 
present Broad Street. Brugh or Bridge Street, as has pre- 
viously been stated, was in use as a street for a considerable 
time before Stone Street was marked out, and the grants of 
land upon it were so deep that nothing remained afterwards 
upon the latter street but this strip acquired by Cornelissen, 
which was only about fifty feet wide at one end, and at the 
end towards Broad Street not more than twenty feet wide. 
It seems to have been still further curtailed of its dimensions 
by a subsequent widening of Brouwer Straet, to the extent 
of several feet, the Director and Council reserving the 
right to so widen the "road" in the grant to Cornelissen in 
1646. Pieter Cornehssen does not seem to have erected any 
house upon this property, but he planted it with fi-uit trees 
in preparation for doing so. The present locality of the south 
side of Stone Street, towards Broad, is little suggestive of 
cherry, peach, and pear trees, yet here they stood in bearing in 
the year 1651, at which time Cornelissen departed from New 
Amsterdam, probably under the orders of the Company, for 
the Dutch settlements on the South or Delaware River. Re- 
turning subsequently to New Amsterdam, he rebuilt, after its 
destruction, in 1655, by the Indians, the mill upon Wessell's 
Creek, in the late town of Newtown, upon Long Island. This 
mill site, in a picturesque spot not far from the resort now 
known as North Beach, was used for its original purposes 
until comparatively recent years, being of late known as 
" Jackson's Mill." Pieter Cornelissen did not operate it very 
long himself, but he purchased land in the immediate neighbor- 
hood, and was the ancestor of a worthy family not yet extinct 
there. Before leaving New Amsterdam, in 1651, he found a 
purchaser for his property on Brouwer Straet, in the person of 
Jacob Kip, the son of Hendrick Hendricksen Kip, the latter 
of whom owned the adjoining property fronting upon Brugh 
or Bridge Street, where his house stood. Hendrick, the 
father, who was sometime of Amsterdam, seems to have been 
one of the earliest settlers in New Amsterdam, and his house 
here had probably been built for several years previous to his 
ground brief for the land in 1642. 



HENDRICK KIP THE TAILOR 37 

Hendrick Hendricksen Kip was perhaps one of the most 
valorous tailors who ever drew needle. If, as Valentine 
somewhat problematically asserts, his cognomen of " Kip " 
meant " chicken," it must have referred to a gamecock^ of the 
first breed. He pitted himself against the redoubtable Director 
Kieft at an early period, and never smoothed his ruffled feathers 
till the latter had departed for the Netherlands upon his recall, 
even refusing to give him a parting shake of the hand in 
token of amnesty. It was several years before that event, or 
about 1643, that Hendrick, according to an officious informer, 
uttered a witticism of appalling audacity towards his " divinely 
appointed magistrate" (as Kieft was fond of calling himself), 
saying that "people ought to send the Kivit" (meaning 
" pee-wit," or " lap-wing," — a play at once upon Kieft's name, 
person, and character) " home by the Pauwe" (peacock), " and 
also to give a letter of recommendation to Master Gerrit " (the 
public executioner, or Jack Ketch, of Holland) ; " he, himself, 
would willingly send a pound Flemish, in order that he should 
let him die like a nobleman." This generous offer had refer- 
ence to the custom in the Germanic countries of inflicting: 
capital punishment upon the nobility by decapitation, and 
upon the lower classes by hanging — a custom alluded to by 
Heine in his appeal to the Kaiser Friedrich Rothbart, or 
Barbarossa, for impartial rule in the " Holy German Empire," 
upon his future awakening from his legendary slumber : 

" Nur manchmal wechsle ab und lass 
Den Adel hangen, und kopfe 
Ein bisschen die Burger und Bauern, wu* sind 
Ja alle Gottesgeschbpfe." 

Change once in a while, and let the nobleman be hung, and 
the peasant's head be chopped off. Are we not all alike 
God's creatures! 



CHAPTER V 

HENDRICK KIP AND HIS HOUSE.— THE KIP COTTAGES 
ON STONE STREET. ~ JAN J AN SEN VAN ST. OBIN AND 
THE SLAVE SHIP " GIDEON" 

Um Christi willen verschone, o Herr, 
Das Leben der schwarzeii Siinder ! 
Erziirnten sie dich, so weisst dn ja, 
Sie sind so dumm wie die Kinder. 

Verschone ihr Leben um Christi willn, 
Der f iir uns alle gestorben ! 
Denn blciben mir nicht dreihundert Stiick, 
So ist mein Geschaft verdorben. 

Heine. 

IN the last preceding chapter, some allusion was made to 
the hostility of Hendrick Hendricksen Kip, the tailor of 
Brugh or Bridge Street, towards Director-General Kieft. 
So hostile was he, in fact, that he actually refused upon one 
occasion to give him something which is usually very freely 
tendered, — being such a cheap gift, — namely, advice. It 
was after Kieft and his associates had patched up a proposed 
treaty with the Indians to end the ruinous war which he had 
brought on the colonists in 1643. The Council, on the 30th 
of August, 1645, ordered the court messenger to " notify all the 
inhabitants to assemble in the Fort when the colors are hoisted 
and the bell rung, to hear the proposals on which a peace is 
about to be concluded with the Indians, and if any one can give 
good advice, then to offer it freely." That worthy made his 
report to the Council that " all the citizens in the Manhat- 
tans, from the highest to the lowest, will attend, except one 
Hendrick Kip, a tailor." 



HENDRICK KIP'S HOUSE 39 

Although Hendrick seems to have been more fortunate than 
many others in keeping out of the clutches of Kieft, yet the 
government had its eye upon him ; and when his more indis- 
creet " huysvrouw " made pubhc statements that " the Direc- 
tor and Council were false judges, and the fiscal a forsworn 
fiscal," it pounced upon her at once on a charge of a sort of 
lese-majeste. The good lady stoutly denied the charges, but 
her husband, with a phenomenal astuteness, appeared before 
the court and stated that " his wife has been so upset and so 
out of health ever since Maryn Adriaensen's attempt to mur- 
der the Director- General, that when disturbed in the least she 
knows not what she does.'' The reference was to the assault 
attempted upon Kieft, nearly three years before, by one Maryn 
Adriaensen, in a quarrel about their respective shares of culpa- 
bility in bringing about the Indian War. The prosecutor and 
the defendant in the court proceedings were ordered to produce 
their evidence, but notliing further appears to have been done 
in the matter, Kieft being soon afterwards recalled. 

With his well-known views respecting the imbecility of the 
late administration in New Netherland, Hendrick Kip was 
chosen one of the committee known as " The Nine Men," 
which drew up a remonstrance to the States-General against the 
policy adopted by the colonial government of the West India 
Company, and the ruinous results brought thereby upon the 
colonists. The new Director-General, Peter Stuyvesant, im- 
mediately took up the cudgels in behalf of all maligned magis- 
trates, and sent the Secretary Van Tienhoven over to the 
Netherlands to refute the charges made before the States- 
General. The " refutation " consisted principally in vilifying 
the members of the Committee who had dared to sign the 
remonstrance. "As to losses," said the Secretary, "Hendrick 
Kip was a tailor, who never lost anything," which in Van 
Tienhoven's mouth was only another way of saying he had 
nothing to lose. 

This, however, was not true. Kip's worldly condition was 
doubtless not equal to that of some of the other colonists, but 
his house, in its garden of about sixty-five feet front upon 



40 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

Bridge Street, was quietly occupied by him for many years ; 
while upon the land adjoining it on Stone Street, where Pieter 
Cornelissen had planted liis garden (previously described), 
Hendrick's two sons, Isaac and Jacob, and his son-in-law, Jan 
Jansen van St. Obin, built houses for themselves. All these 
houses had a clear outlook upon the East River, and upon 
the vessels in port (which usually anchored directly in front 
of them), and to the wooded Long Island shores beyond, — 
for no houses were built at this point along the river shore at 
Pearl Street, to intercept the view, prior to 1656. The last 
buildings upon the shore at that time, coming eastwards from 
the fort, were the former Dutch church and its parsonage, 
erected in 1633, the church standing nearly opposite the 
westerly corner of Hendrick Kip's garden. 

It has been already stated that the two sons and the son-in- 
law of Hendrick Kip had their dwellings upon the south side 
of Stone Street, in what had previously been Pieter Cornelis- 
sen's garden. These were probably small cottages, as the 
plots of ground upon which they stood were of small size ; and 
they were built just about the period of our survey, in 1655, 
though the precise dates are uncertain. Their owners were 
quite young men at the time, and recently married. The 
easternmost of these houses, which extended within forty or 
fifty feet of the present Broad Street, was that of Isaac Kip, 
afterwards a Hudson River trader; and near it on the west 
was that of his brother Jacob, — the site of both these build- 
ings being now covered by Davidson's Caf^. Jacob Kip, the 
second of these brothers, was a man of considerable activity 
and enterprise. His marriage, in 1654, to Marie de la 
Montague, daughter of Doctor Jean (or Johannes, using the 
Latinized form, by which he was generally known) de la 
Montague, seems to have served him in the way of advance- 
ment, his wife's father — a French Huguenot, and a man of 
education — having stood high in the favor of Kieft and of 
the Directors of the West India Company. As one of the city 
magistrates, and as Secretary of the Court of Burgomasters, 
Jacob Kip's bold, business-like signature is familiar in the 



JAN JANSEN VAN ST. OBIN 41 

old records, and indeed he was a clerk to Director-General 
Stuyvesant at a still earlier date, in 1650. In later years, he 
became somewhat of an investor in unimproved or farm lands 
on Manhattan Island, and about the year 1670 he bought an 
old " frontier " plantation which had seen many vicissitudes, 
and there established a farm, to the vicinity of which he gave 
a name that became historic, the memory of which has not yet 
entirely faded away ; namely, that of " Kip's Bay," on the 
East River at about Thirty-Fifth to Thirty-Seventh streets, 

Jan Jansen, the brother-in-law of the two young Kips, who 
also occupied a house upon the south side of Stone Street, 
somewhat to the west of the cottages of the latter, was a per- 
son of a rather different disposition. He was undoubtedly of 
Dutch or of Flemish extraction, and is usually spoken of in 
the records of the time as Jan Jansen van St. Obin ; but in 
the church record of his marriage in 1649 to Baertje (or 
Bertha) Hendrickse Kip, his place of nativity is given as 
" Tiibingen," — presumably the city of that name in the 
Duchy of Wiirtemberg, in Germany. While there may be 
grounds for supposing, from the similarity of sound, that the 
latter designation is a mistake or a corruption of some other 
name, the locality of " St. Obin " seems to be unknown in 
Dutch topography. Jan Jansen's father, Jan Wansaer, seems 
to have been a resident of Casant, not far from Antwerp. 

Jan Jansen van St. Obin was a person of nautical proclivi- 
ties, insomuch that he became a part owner of the small French 
frigate " La Garce," which sailed as a privateer under letters 
from the Dutch government. She afterwards got into trouble 
with the Admiralty about her prizes, but at the time of Jan 
Jansen's interest in her (for he appears to have sold out his 
share in 1646) we may presume that she confined her atten- 
tion strictly to the Spanish and Portuguese craft which were 
within the line of her legitimate business, though the captains 
of privateering vessels in this war were sometimes rather 
obtuse upon such points, and took almost anything that came 
along. Whether Jan Jansen sailed personally in the priva- 
teer is not known, but certain it is that occasionally, about 



42 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

this time, bis business seems to have called him away from 
New Amsterdam for protracted periods, at which times be bad 
the practice of depositing with various prominent men of New 
Amsterdam considerable amounts of personal property, taking 
their receipts for it, which he caused to be promptly entered 
upon the books of the Secretary of the Colony. Upon one of 
these occasions, the deposit was of quite a large amount of 
silver ware, — rather an unusual stock for a New Netherland 
" trader," and which leads to the conjecture that it may have 
been picked up by him somewhere upon the Spanish main, 
or perhaps in the West Indies. Jan Jansen, however, was 
not always fortunate in his adventures, for shortly prior to 
1654, a bark in which he was then interested was captured 
— or "stolen," as the Dutch authorities expressed it — by 
Thomas Baxter, claiming to act under letters of marque 
issued at Rhode Island, to which previous allusion has been 
made. Baxter, who was probably not much hampered by 
Admiralty rules, promptly disposed of his prize to Thomas 
Moore of New Haven, but the Dutch government contrived 
to bring such pressure to bear upon the latter that, together 
with Isaac Allerton, the leading merchant in the New England 
trade, at New Amsterdam, he gave a bond for the restoration 
of the vessel or its value. 

Jan Jansen van St.Obin is perhaps most prominently known 
as the pilot of the slave ship " Gideon," which arrived at the 
harbor of New Amsterdam, with a cargo of two hundred and 
ninety slaves, in August, 1664, a few days before the appear- 
ance of the Enghsh fleet concerned in the capture of New 
Netherland. These slaves, Director Stuyvesant wrote, were 
" a very poor assortment. The females certainly all so poor 
that we apprehend the largest part of them will remain at our 
charge, or we must otherwise part with them at a very low 
price." The Director-General's estimate of the condition of 
these blacks appears to have been a pretty just one, for we 
afterwards find Johan de Decker (who had been a member of 
Director Stuyvesant's Council, but who, having become ob- 
noxious to the new authorities, had been ordered to " within 



THE SLAVE TRADE 43 

the space of ten dayes transporte himselfe out of this governe- 
ment"), presenting a petition from Amsterdam to the Duke 
of York for the restoration of certain negroes, forming a part 
of the Gideon's " assortment " which had been seized at New 
Amsterdam by order of Governor NicoU. It appears from 
this document that twenty of these negroes had been allotted 
to the petitioner by way of settlement of his arrears of vsalary 
at New Amsterdam : ten of them he had otherwise disposed 
of, " having ye other tenne negroes in (now so called) New 
Yorke in ye custody of one Resolved Waldron to dyett and 
keep them for your petitioner." The " Gideon " had evidently 
lacked the master mind of "The supercargo, Mynheer van 
Koek," of Heine's ballad, who, being distressed by the an- 
nouncement from the physician of his slave-ship that the 
negroes were dying upon the passage in great numbers, from 
melancholy, devised the genial scheme of forcing them by 
the lash to daily dances to quick music, in order to keep up 
their spirits and drive dull care away. 

Whether Jan Jansen, as pilot of the " Gideon," received 
his pay in the same commodity as De Decker, we are not in- 
formed. He certainly suffered no diminution of respectability 
in the community of his time by reason of his occupation ; 
furthermore, the gains were large, and that alone would have 
been quite sufficient with most of his neighbors to smother 
any inconvenient suggestions that might have arisen : — 

" Glass beads, and brandy, and scissors and knives, 

And other cheap trash for them giving, — 
The profit at least eight hundred per cent, 

If I keep the half of them living. 
For fetch I three hundred blacks alive 

To the port of Rio Janeiro, 
'T is a hundred ducats apiece for me, 

From the house of Gonzales Perreiro." 

If any supersensitive persons were found who ventured to 
question the right and justice of this traffic, a host of sup- 
porters were as ready then as now, with about as much or as 
little hypocrisy, to show the divinely appointed rights of the 



44 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

superior race over the inferior, and the law of Destiny which 
imperatively demanded that the latter should be flogged, as it 
were, out of darkness into the light. 

It is only fair to say, however, that among the Dutch of 
New Netherland the slave trade exhibited its least repulsive 
features. No important difficulties occurred between the 
blacks and their masters in New Amsterdam, nor do the 
former seem to have been often the subjects of any serious 
criminal prosecutions. The negroes settled down into house 
and farm servants; the relations between them and their 
masters were usually of a somewhat patriarchal nature, manu- 
missions were frequent, and sincere attachment was often 
manifested on both sides. It was the hysterical English and 
their Recorder, Horsmanden, who were responsible for tl;ie 
ghastly tragedy of the "Negro Plot " in the next century, and 
for the fiendish torture of the numerous innocent victims of 
that insane delusion. 




-y 



'^■"^yyiJ w''^ 






CHAPTER VI 

THE WATER-SIDE. — DR. HANS KIERSTED. — THE HOUSES 
OF CORNELIS VAN STEENWYCK AND JOHANNES NEVIUS. 
— CAPTAIN PAULUS VANDERGRIFT—THE STOREHOUSE 
OF THE WEST INDIA COMPANY. — THE WAREHOUSE 
OF AUGUSTYN HEERMANS. — SECRETARY VAN TIEN- 
HOVEN. — THE OLD CHURCH AND PARSONAGE 

SOME notice should be taken of the buildings along the river 
shore, east of the Marckveldt, or Whitehall Street, and of 
their occupants in the year 1655. These houses fronted upon 
an open street, then called 't Water, — the modern Pearl 
Street, — but upon the opposite side of the roadway was the 
open shingly beach of the East River. The houses here, at 
the time of our survey, stood in compact order, and were 
substantially built, most if not all of them being of brick. 
Though the deeds or ground briefs for most of the parcels of 
land at this locality were made from 1645 to 1647, it is diffi- 
cult to believe that they had not been in several instances 
built upon at an earlier period. Nearly all of the buildings 
were used for mercantile purposes, the front portions of the 
structures being probably used as stores, while the occupants 
availed themselves of the other portions for their dwellings. 
This place was, in short, the seat of the larger part of the 
wholesale and retail trade of the town. 

Of the first building, in proceeding eastwards from the 
Marckveldt, which building was the former storehouse of 
the West India Company, mention has already been made.^ 
The next house, which soon became the corner one by the 
removal of the structure of the West India Company, was long 
the residence of Doctor Hans Kiersted, the leading physician 

1 See ante, page 18. 



46 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

and surgeon of the town. Hans Kiersted and his brother 
Jochera (the latter of whom perished in 1647, in the wreck 
of the " Princess ") were Germans from Magdeburg; and as 
they were early residents of New Amsterdam, there is reason 
to suspect that they were refugees after the dreadful sack of 
Magdeburg by Count Tilly's savage troops in the year 1631, 
at which time Hans Kiersted was about nineteen years of age. 
He is found, as early as the year 1638, holding the position of 
official surgeon of the West India Company at New Amster- 
dam, and the Dutch records contain many of his official cer- 
tificates given within the next eight or ten years as to wounds 
received in various affrays by the quarrelsome soldiers of the 
garrison at Fort Amsterdam. 

In 1642, by his marriage to Sarah Roeloffse, Doctor 
Kiersted became son-in-law to Annetje Janse Bogardus, and 
within a few years after that event, — as early as 1646, — we 
find him residing here upon the water-side, where his humble 
stock of drugs would doubtless have formed a great contrast 
to that of the modern "pharmacy " which has been established 
next door to the original site of the trade in New Amsterdam. 
Before 1648, "Doctor Hans," as he was frequently called, 
had quitted the service of the West India Company, and was 
engaged in his own private practice, which seems to have 
been a reasonably lucrative one, for as early as 1646 he was 
the owner of a " plantation " upon the Bouwery Lane, about 
a mile and a half out of the town. Doctor Kiersted died 
shortly prior to 1667, but fifty years later his property at the 
corner of Pearl and Whitehall streets was still in the occu- 
pation of his descendants. 

The next neighbor upon the east of Doctor Hans, in the 
year 1655, was a man who, though not particularly con- 
spicuous at that time, subsequently became of considerable 
prominence in the town; this was Cornelis Jacobsen van 
Steenwyck, formerly of Haerlem in Holland. The period 
of his coming to New Amsterdam is not known, though he is 
mentioned as early as 1651, and it appears probable that he 
was a brother of Abraham Jacobsen van Steenwyck, who is 



CORNELIS VAN STEENWYCK 47 

found at New Amsterdam as early as 1643. Cornelis van 
Steenwyck was a merchant, and in all probability had his 
store in this building, which occupied the site of the present 
No. 27 Pearl Street; it was a modest house, like that of his 
neighbors on either side, and it had not been built by Van 
Steenwyck himself, but was purchased by him in 1653 from 
a Norwegian, Roeloff Jansen Haies, who seems to have been 
the first owner of the property. 

Cornelis van Steenwyck soon became interested in shipping 
ventures ; in 1654 he was a partner with several of the prin- 
cipal men of the town ^ in the ship " Golden Shark," then 
sent on a voyage to the West Indies, and in the next year 
we find him, with several others, signing a protest against the 
action of the Director and Council, who had refused to allow 
the signers to proceed upon a contemplated voyage to Hol- 
land, — for this each of the signers was fined 25 guilders by 
the despotic Stuyvesant. In spite, however, of differences 
with the authorities, Van Steenwyck seems to have thrived 
so well that, in 1063, the Director-General himself had 
become a borrower on behalf of the needy West India Com- 
pany from that merchant, who agreed to advance the sum of 
12,000 guilders (about $4800) in wampum, upon a draft on 
the West India Company, backed up by the curious collateral 
security of four brass cannon in Fort Amsterdam. He had 
at this time indeed become one of the leading merchants in 
New Amsterdam, with a keen eye for profits in almost any 
direction, handling at one time a cargo of salt, and at another 
a cargo of negro slaves. His business, at the time of the 
surrender to the English in 1664, had outgrown his modest 
store on 't Water, and for several years he had occupied a 
more elaborate establishment at the corner of the present 
Bridge and Whitehall streets, just back of the house in 
which he had dwelt in 1655. 

With a fair knowledge of the English language, and with 
a disposition readily to accept the English rule, Cornelis van 

^ With Paulus Leendertsen van der Grift, Cornelis Schutt, Allard Anthony, 
and Govert Loockermaus. 



48 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

Steenwyck soon acquired the confidence of the new authori- 
ties, and was a member of the Colonial Council under Gov- 
ernors Nicolls and Lovelace. Furthermore, he was popular 
with the Dutch citizens, was one of the burgomasters of the 
city both before and after the surrender, and was mayor from 
1668 to 1670, and again in 1682 and 1683, shortly before his 
death. In his latter years Cornelis van Steenwyck, who had 
long been considered to be a man of wealth, probably kept up 
as luxurious a style of living as any one in the Colony at that 
time, but at the period of our survey he was an unmarried man, 
and his store on 't Water was doubtless not materially different 
from the ordinary general store of a small trading town.^ 

The next neighbor of Cornelis van Steenwyck upon the 
east, in the year of our survey, was a man who was afterwards 
of some prominence as notary and Clerk of the Burgomasters, 
or City Clerk, as he may be called, which office he held as 
early as 1658, and which he filled for a number of years 
subsequent to that time. This was Johannes Nevius, who 
is said to have come from Solen or Zoelen, a village of the 
district known as The Betuwe, which skirts the south bank 
of the Rhine below Arnhem, and who was himself, at the 
period of our survey, one of the city magistrates or schepens, 
of New Amsterdam, and was a merchant or trader who 
seems to have been associated in business with his wife's 
step-father, Cornelis de Potter, a merchant of note in the 
town. 2 Looking a mile or so up the East River from his 
windows upon the water-side, Johannes Nevius could see 
the dwelling-house and the pastures and grain-fields of his 
father-in-law's farm just where the Breucklyn Road came 
down the hill at the present Fulton Street in Brooklyn. 
Here De Potter had purchased, as early as 1652, from 
Cornelis Dircksen, the old ferryman, and from one or two 

1 For sketch by Mr. D. T. Valentine, giving many curious particulars of 
Cornelis van Steenwyck, see Man. N. Y. Com. Council for 1864, p. 648, 

2 In 1654 Nevius and Cornelis de Potter were sued as being jointly indebted 
for the construction of a vessel called the " New Love." 




Portrait of Cornelis vax Steenwyck. 



THE TOWN CLERK NEVIUS 49 

other owners, the ferry property with sixty or seventy acres 
of land lying north of Fulton Street; and with the curious 
appurtenance of "thirty -five goats and a half on Jan Marris' 
farm at Gravesend," — evidently a share or interest in a herd 
kept there. He does not seem to have managed the ferry in 
person, but leased it to others. 

Ariaentje Bleyck, the wife of Johannes Nevius and step- 
daughter of Cornells de Potter, appears by her marriage 
record in the Dutch Church on Nov. 18, 1653, to have been 
a native of, or at any rate to have resided at, Batavia, in the 
island of Java. It was there, in all probability, that her 
mother, Swantje Janse, married Cornells de Potter (who was 
doubtless a widower at the time), since his own daughter 
Elizabeth, who in the same year of the marriage of her step- 
sister was united in matrimony to Isaac Bedlo, afterwards a 
man of note in New Amsterdam, appears likewise in the 
marriage record as from Batavia. 

Johannes Nevius did not long occupy the house on 't 
Water in New Amsterdam, for in 1658 he sold it to his 
neighbor Cornells van Steenwyck. Subsequently the build- 
ing, which covered the site of the present house, No. 29 Pearl 
Street, became of interest, as the residence for a long time of 
Dominie Samuel Drisius, minister of the Dutch Church at 
New Amsterdam from 1652 to 1671.^ 

In the very interesting and important view of New Am- 
sterdam which appears upon the map of Nicolaes Visscher, 
of about 1652,2 ^g ^qH g^g \^ ^j^g Justus Danckers view 

1 Johannes Nevius, after the surrender to the English in 1664, found himself 
greatly hampered in his ofhce of city clerk, by reason of his imperfect knowledge 
of the English language. After using the services of an English assistant for a 
time, he appears to have given up his office, and to have devoted his latter years 
to the management of the ferry establishment belonging to his then deceased 
father-in-law's estate. There is a bill extant for ferry services performed by 
Johannes Nevius, which was presented to Secretary Nicolls, of the Colonial 
Government, in 1676, by the widow of Nevius ; she had previously, in 1672, upon 
her petition setting forth that she was a widow " with six small helpless chil- 
dren," been allowed an extension for six years of her husband's ferry lease. 

^ Entitled, " Novi Belgii, Novseque Angliae necnon partis VirginiiE Tabula 

4 



62- NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

know. If Captain Van der Grift ever actually resided in this 
house it was probably for no long period, for at an early date 
he built a residence upon the North River, west of Broad- 
way, where, in the Indian attack of 1655, he is said to have 
been severely wounded by a blow from an axe, at the hands 
of one of the savages. 

After the surrender to the English in 1664, Captain 
Van der Grift was one of the irreconcilables, and in or about 
the year 1671 he closed out his interests in New York, by 
the sale of all his real estate to various parties, and returned 
to the Netherlands. His storehouse on 't Water, above 
referred to, occupied the site of the present building. No. 31 
Pearl Street. 

It was apparently a short time prior to the year 1649 
that the Director-General and Council decided to build a 
more spacious and substantial storehouse, or "pack-huys," 
for the West India Company at New Amsterdam, than it had 
previously possessed. The building erected in pursuance of 
this resolution stood next eastward from Captain Van der 
Grift's warehouse, and was the middle one of the three tall 
structures previously referred to as appearing upon the 
Visscher and upon the Justus Danckers views of New Am- 
sterdam. The edifice was probably of brick, and is without 
doubt the one referred to in a communication written in 
the year 1649, in which we find the economical Board of 
Directors of the West India Company, at Amsterdam, cen- 
suring the authorities of New Netherland "for building a 
storehouse, or undertaking the same, one hundred feet long 
and nineteen feet broad, without knowing precisely what 
for." This structure was evidently used, in part, at the 
last-mentioned date as a custom-house; for in "The Peti- 
tion of the Commonalty " to the home authorities, made in 
that year, speaking of importations into the Colony, "the 
cargo," say the petitioners, "is discharged into the Com- 
pany's warehouse, and there it proceeds so as to be a grief 
and vexation to behold, for it is all measured anew, un- 



THE "PACK-HUYS" 63 

packed, thrown about and counted, without either rule or 
order; besides, the Company's servants bite sharp and carry 
away." 

When, in 1664, New Netherland was surrendered to the 
English, the pack-huys was confiscated as being the property 
of the West India Company, and the building became the 
custom-house of the new administration, for which pur- 
pose it was used until the middle of the following century, 
when, having been negligently allowed by the colonial 
authorities to fall into disrepair, it came to be considered 
dangerous, and was presented as a nuisance by the Grand 
Jury about the year 1750, soon after which it was ordered 
to be demolished, the Custom-House having been in the 
mean time removed to the western side of Broadway. The 
site of this interesting building, the worn threshold of which 
must have been trodden by nearly every man of prominence 
in the business and j)olitical life of New Amsterdam and of 
New York in the latter half of the seventeenth and in the 
first half of the eighteenth century, was the westerly portion 
of the present large tea warehouse, No. 33 Pearl Street. 

The third, or easternmost of the three prominent houses 
upon the Visscher and Danckers views of New Amsterdam, 
referred to above, had been built before the year 1651, by 
Augustyn Heermans, of whom a more extended notice will 
be given hereafter, in connection with his residence in what 
was called the Smits Vly. At an early date — certainly as 
early as 1644, and in all probability for a number of years 
before that time — Augustyn Heermans had been the agent 
or factor at New Amsterdam of the mercantile firm of Peter 
Gabry and Sons, of Amsterdam. No mention is made of the 
site of the first trading house or store of Heermans, but it is 
very likely to have been the same spot where afterwards, 
about 1650, he erected a substantial warehouse, the descrip- 
tion of which is still extant. The building was, so we are 
told, twenty-eight feet broad and sixty-four feet long (about 
twenty-six by fifty-nine English feet), " with a cellar under 



54 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

the whole." Its walls were two feet in thickness, and it was 
" three royal stories high ; " that is, three full or high-ceiled 
stories, not including the lofts under the tall-gabled roof. In 
the rear it appears to have possessed an out-kitchen, fitting 
it for a residence as well as for a storehouse. This spacious 
building seems to have been in part used as a tobacco ware- 
house, in which trade Heermans was largely interested, for in 
a petition made by him, in 1658, for permission to make a 
voyage to the Dutch and French West Indies, he describes 
himself as "the first beginner of the Virginia tobacco trade." 
The site of this building is at present covered by the easterly 
portion of the warehouse, No. 33 Pearl Street, and by the 
westerly portion of No. 35. 

Heermans was also engaged in business adventures of a 
different nature, for in 1646 we find him, with several other 
citizens of New Amsterdam, partners in a small privateer 
called "La Garce," which annoyed the Spaniards a good deal, 
but which finally made an illegal capture which must have 
entailed considerable loss upon her owners. It may have 
been owing to this cause that, in 1651, Augustyn Heermans 
had fallen into financial difficulties; and upon the 17th of 
July of that year, he made a conveyance of his warehouse on 
't Water to Cornells van Werckhoven, as curator, or trustee 
of the estate of Peter Gabry, deceased, the head of the 
Amsterdam firm of which Heermans was the factor. His 
other creditors, however, began to press Heermans, and in 
1652 he found himself obliged to leave New Amsterdam 
temporarily, and to make an assignment of his property to 
his neighbor. Captain Paulus Leendertsen van der Grift, and 
to Allard Anthony. A settlement, however, was soon made 
with the creditors, and on the 8th of May, 1653, we find the 
latter executing an agreement to abide by the valuation 
which should be placed by arbitrators upon the warehouse 
which had been previously conveyed in trust for the Gabrys, 
and which, as it would appear, the creditors claimed had 
been 'put in at a figure below its value. The arbitrators 
accordingly reported that the building was worth 8500 



SECRETARY VAN TIENPIOVEN 55 

guilders, or about $3400 of the present currency. No 
further opposition appears to have been made by the cred- 
itors, and Heermans was soon upon his feet again, finan- 
cially. The warehouse remained in the possession of the 
Gabr}'S till the English capture of New Amsterdam, in 1664, 
when the building, like the pack-huys adjoining, was con- 
fiscated on the ground that it belonged to the subjects of a 
hostile foreign State. A few years afterwards we find it in 
the occupation of Captain William Dyre, collector of the 
port of New York. By the Danker and Sluyter view, of 
1679, it would appear that prior to that date this building, 
with the adjoining pack-huys, had been newly fronted, giving 
the two structures the appearance of one edifice, of consider- 
able size. 

The two large modern warehouses, Nos. 33 and 35 Pearl 
Street, occupy sites around which many interesting associa- 
tions cluster. In addition to that portion of the buildings 
upon the site of which stood the edifices already described, 
the eastern portion of No. 35 Pearl Street was, in 1655, the 
site of a dwelling-house of little less interest. Here might 
have been seen daily, passing to and from this house at 
the period named, or taking his ease upon fine days, at its 
threshold, in the very rare intervals of his leisure, — for he 
led a busy life, — a middle-aged man of corpulent habit 
"with red and bloated visage and light hair." This was 
Cornells van Tienhoven, Secretary of the Council, more 
particularly identified than any other individual with the 
history of New Netherland during at least a score of the 
earlier years of its existence. While little is known about 
the younger years of this man,^ we find that he early acquired 
an influence in the government of New Netherland, which 
he preserved under such dissimilar administrations as those 
of Directors Van Twiller, Kieft, and Stuyvesant. This in- 
fluence he managed to preserve too in spite of many rash 

1 According to Valentine, he was book-keeper of wages for the West India 
Company, as early as 1633. 



56 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

and unfortunate schemes, for which he was in large measure 
responsible, and in spite of the incessant attacks of his 
enemies, who comprised a large part of the community. His 
character has been drawn in the "Vertoogh," or "Remon- 
strance of New Netherland," in 1649, by no friendly hand, 
but in a manner which seems to be justified by the facts we 
know of him. "He is," say the authors of this vigorous 
paper, " crafty, subtle, intelligent, sharp-witted, — good gifts 
when properly applied. ... He is a great adept at dissimu- 
lation, and even when laughing, intends to bite, and pro- 
fesses the warmest friendship where he hates the deepest. 
... In his words and acts he is loose, false, deceitful, and 
given to lying : prodigal of promises, and when it comes to 
performance, there is nobody at home. . . . Now, if the 
voice of the people be the voice of God, of this man hardly 
any good can with truth be said, and no evil concealed." It 
was Cornelis van Tienhoven who shared with Kieft the 
odium of the Indian War of 1643, as well as of the earlier 
expedition against the Raritans which resulted in the destruc- 
tion of the first colonists of Staten Island. Of his flagrant 
immorality even the sanctimonious Stuyvesant had full 
knowledge. During his sojourn in the Netherlands in 
1650-51, while acting as Stuyvesant's agent to refute the 
charges made against the colonial government, he almost 
openly defied the States-General, ^ yet he contrived to remain 
in apparently undiminished authority at New Amsterdam, 
defying and harassing his enemies as usual. 

At the period of our survey, however, the Secretary's time 
was growing short, and it was in June of the next year, 
1656, that he appeared with apparently undiminished assur- 
ance before the burgomasters of the town, and, announcing 
that he had been dismissed from office, he requested that a 
formal certificate might be given to him of his efficiency in 
the office of schout, or sheriff, which he had also held. In 
the fall of the same year he disappeared from New Amster- 
dam; some articles of his attire found on the river shore 

1 See post, page 119. 



VAN TIENHOVEN'S FAMILY 57 

induced the belief that he had committed suicide, while 
many stoutly asserted that he had absconded to get out of 
the reach of his numerous enemies. There seems to be, 
however, no reliable evidence that he was ever heard of 
afterwards; and there would appear to have been little 
opportunity for a man of such prominence as the ex-Sec- 
retary to get away from New Netherland without discovery 
and to keep himself in complete concealment. 

Van Tienhoven's residence on 't Water (which does not 
appear upon the Visscher view of New Amsterdam of 1651 
or 1652) had not been built by the Secretary himself, but 
probably by one Jacob Haie, from whom Van Tienhoven 
had bought it in the spring of 1653, the house appearing to 
have been then recently erected. Next to it, upon the east, 
lay a vacant lot composed of a part of the then closed 
Church Lane, — originally a continuation of the Brugh 
Steegh. This had been granted in the early part of 1647, 
upon the breaking up of the old church property here, to 
Oloff Stevensen van Cortlandt, who however did not build 
upon it, but sold it to Jacob Varrevanger within a year or 
two ; and in 1655, the year of our survey, it was acquired by 
Van Tienhoven, who seems to have built upon it before his 
disappearance from New Netherland. The Secretary, prior 
to 1638, had married Rachel Vinje, the stepdaughter of Jan 
Damen, one of the leading men of the Colony ; and after the 
disappearance of her husband, she lived here with her young 
children for a few years till her death in 1663. The chil- 
dren, of whom Lucas, the eldest, was about fourteen years of 
age at his mother's death, and his sister Jannetje was six, 
appear to have been cared for by their uncle Pieter Stouten- 
burgh,! and after they had grown up and come into posses- 
sion of the considerable landed estate left by their parents, ^ 

1 He had married Aefje van Tienhoven, sister of the Secretary, in 1649. 

^ Rachel van Tienhoven had inherited one-fourth part of the Damen farm, 
lying between Wall Street and Maiden Lane, while Cornelis, her husband, besides 
several parcels of land in the town proper, was the owner of the farm lying 
between the modern Maiden Lane and Ann Street. 



58 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

Lucas van Tienhoven, who became a phj^sician of promi- 
nence, occupied for many years the former residence of his 
father on 't Water, while his sister Jannetje, who had 
married a person named John Smith, resided in tlie house 
adjoining upon the east on the site of the present No. 37 
Pearl Street. 

The dingy warehouses of the present day, in the locality 
at which we have now arrived, with their closed shutters, 
give the impression that they are in a condition of perma- 
nent slumber, only waking up at intervals to receive or to 
discharge an occasional truck-load of merchandise, and then 
relapsing into somnolence. There is little in the surround- 
ings now to call up ecclesiastical associations, yet here, upon 
the site of the warehouse. No. 39 Pearl Street, ^ stood the 
first church building erected between the Plymouth Colony 
and Virginia (the churches of which settlements antedated 
this by but very few years), and where Dominie Bogardus 
preached to tlie ancestors of many of the principal New York 
families. Not even a cheap memorial tablet marks the spot. 

The church edifice, which was constructed of wood, in the 
year 1633, was doubtless not built for architectural effect; 
since critics speak of it, at the time of the' building of the 
new church within the fort, as "a mean barn."^ The waters 
of the East River washed the shore a few rods in front of 
the entrance to the church, from which, upon fine Sabbath 
mornings, the congregation must have often looked across to 
the white sand bluffs of the heights of Long Island, shining 
in the sun, and crowned by unbroken forests which extended 
to the horizon. At the west side of the building a narrow 
lane or passage ran through from Brugh Straet (modern 

1 And probably upon a few feet of the building No. 37. 

2 The people generally, however, are stated to have been opposed to the build- 
ing of the new church within the walls of the fort, and this measure is described 
by contemporary writers as having been largely the work of Director Kieft him- 
self, who may even then have had in contemplation his plan of exterminating 
the neighboring Indians, and was therefore desirous of providing against future 
contingencies. 



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THE OLD CHURCH AND PARSONAGE 59 

Bridge Street) to the shore, while upon its east side, and 
probably fronting the Brugli Straet, stood the modest parson- 
age with the Dominie's stable near it, this latter structure 
standing apparently upon the lane and in the rear of the 
church. It was at this parsonage, ^ in all probability, that the 
historic wedding took place, in the fall of 1642, of Doctor 
Hans Kiersted to Dominie Bogardus's eldest stepdaughter, 
Sara Roelofse. Director-General Kieft, who was then on 
good terms with the Dominie, was present, and had a plan 
for getting a liberal subscription for the new church upon 
this occasion. "The Director," say the authors of the 
"Remonstrance of New Netherland," "thought this a good 
time for his purpose, and set to work after the fourth or fifth 
drink; and he himself setting a liberal example, let the 
wedding guests sign whatever they were disposed to give 
towards the church. Each then, with a light head, sub- 
scribed away at a handsome rate, one competing with the 
other, and although some heartily repented it when their 
senses came back, they were obliged nevertheless to pay." 
When the new church in the fort was sufficiently advanced 
in building, so that religious services might be held within 
it, and about the year 1643 or 1644, the old church building 
became a sort of "lumber house" of the West India Com- 
pany, where tol^acco, furs, and other articles were stored and 
prepared for shipment, and where wood was piled and sawed, 
sometimes by prisoners serving out sentences. In 1647 the 
Church Lane and the parsonage were sold, — the latter to one 
Pieter Lourensen. Finally, in 1656, the Company decided 
to sell the old church at auction, and upon such sale it was 
purchased by Jacob van Couwenhoven, a trader and general 
speculator, who soon transferred it to Isaac de Foreest; the 
latter owned the building many years, and it appears to have 
been generally used as a warehouse of some description, but 
it was afterwards made a dwelling-house, and was for a long 

1 The site of this parsonage would appear to have been the rear of the 
modern building, No. 45 Pearl Street. There is here, for some reason, a break in 
the consecutive numbering of the modern houses. 



60 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

time the residence of Allard Anthony or of his family; it 
was standing as late as 1718. If, as seems to be the case, it 
is the building prominently shown near the shore and east of 
the pack-huys of the West India Company, in the Visscher 
view of New Amsterdam, it would appear to have been a low 
structure with not the slightest pretensions to ornamentation 
of any description ; it was doubtless sufficiently spacious in 
its ground-plan, but presents a rather "squatty" appearance, 
and the term "barn," as applied to it, is not inapt.^ 

Beyond the church and the parsonage, as far as the ditch, 
or "graft," in the present Broad Street, the ground was open 
and ungranted at the time of our survey, but in the following 
year 1656, the remainder of the ground embraced in the 
present block between Bridge and Pearl streets was granted, 
in four small parcels to different persons, Avho soon built upon 
their lots here. 

1 As to apparent defects occurring just at this point in the Justus Danckers 
view of New Amsterdam, see remarks in Appendix I., to this volume. 



CHAPTER VII 

ADAM ROELANTSEN, THE FIRST SCHOOLMASTER IN NEW 
AMSTERDAM, AND HIS HOUSE ON STONE STREET.— 
CAPTAIN WILLEM TOMASSEN 

From hence the low murmur of his pupils' voices, conning over their lessons, 
might be heard in a drowsy summer's day, like the hum of a beehive, interrupted 
now and then by the authoritative voice of the master, in the tone of menace or 
command ; or, peradventure, by the appalling sound of the birch, as he urged 
gome tardy loiterer along the flowery path of knowledge. 

Irving : " Legend of Sleepy Hollow," 

WE take our station again at the garden attached to 
Philip Geraerdy's White Horse tavern, whicli has 
been already described as having been upon the north side of 
Stone Street near Whitehall. Here the proprietor, hoeing 
his beans and cabbages and parsnips in the early summer 
morning, has probably often stopped to discuss the news of 
the day with his neighbor, Adam Roelantsen, the first school- 
master of New Amsterdam, over the fence of rougli palisades 
which divided their respective gardens. Adam Roelantsen 
Groen — for that was the full name, of which he occasionally 
made use — came over from the ancient little town of 
Dockum, situated in Friesland, in the extreme north of the 
Netherlands and within six or eight miles of the shore of the 
North Sea, where it stood surrounded by rich but treeless and 
monotonous meadows, and by the numerous salt-pans along 
the river Ee. 

Adam Roelantsen arrived from the Netherlands while still 
a young man and as one of the earlier colonists ; he was born 
about 1606, and was at New Amsterdam before the year 1633. 
The Frisians seem frequently to possess an aptitude for the 
exact sciences, particularly for mathematics, which renders 



62 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

them valuable as schoolteachers, but as to Roelantsen's labors 
in this capacity, very little is known. He could hardly have 
taught many pupils at his earliest house, for it was very 
small, having in all probability been one of the original log 
and bark cottages of the settlement; it stood upon a mere 
slip of land but little larger than the house itself, and which 
lay between Geraerdy's garden and the Brouwer or Stone 
Street, and was probably the remains of a larger plot enclosed 
before the street was projected. To the eastward, on the 
north side of Stone Street, Roelantsen had a garden of fair 
extent, rather more than fifty by one hundred feet in area. 
A curious fact, showing the condition of the rising village, is 
that in 1641, Jan Damen's cattle, pasturing on the West 
India Company's land above the present Beaver Street, leased 
by Damen, broke out and made their way into this garden of 
Roelantsen, — there being apparently at that time no enclosed 
land lying between, — where they committed depredations for 
which he was awarded damages in the sum of twenty-three 
carolus guilders, — some eight or ten dollars of the present 
currency. 

Roelantsen possessed one trait which must have seriously 
impaired his usefulness as an instructor: he seems to have 
been fond of prying into his neighbor's private affairs ; and 
he not only kept a sharp eye on their actions, but when he 
discovered anything particularly racy, he retailed it out with 
great unction. This, as early as the year 1638, had brought 
out quite a crop of slander prosecutions, not only against 
Roelantsen, but by him against some of his assailants. These 
usually terminated, however, after the New Amsterdam 
fashion, in which the parties, after accusing one another of 
the most villanous actions, rushed to the court for redress, 
and when the cause came on for hearing, — either because 
they had no evidence to support or to defeat the charges, or 
else for the purpose of saving the costs of the trial, — they 
commonly retracted all that had been said on either side, and 
gave each other clean, not to say complimentary, bills ( of 
character, which were duly spread upon the minutes of the 



ROELANTSEN, THE SCHOOLMASTER 63 

court. Roelantsen, indeed, was not a popular man, and as earl}' 
as 1643 he had a rival at New Amsterdam in the person of Jan 
Stevensen, another schoolmaster; but as little is known of the 
latter in that capacity as of Roelantsen himself. The proba- 
bilities are, however, that Adam was forced to resort to other 
means of eking out a livehhood for himself and for his young 
family. Mr. Valentine says, from certain court proceedings 
in 1638, that there is " some reason to suppose that the town 
schoolmaster also took in washing." This was, in fact, a suit 
by Roelantsen for the washing of defendant's linen, in which 
the defence was that " the year is not yet elapsed." It evi- 
dently referred to the business, still conducted to a consider- 
able extent in Holland, of contracting for the washing for 
various periods, for individuals or for families, the work being 
carried on by employes of the contractor. 

Affairs did not thrive with Adam Roelantsen, who seems to 
have found himself considerably burdened with debts. Part 
of these were no doubt incurred in building a new and larger 
house for himself a little to the east of his old one, upon the 
north side of Stone Street, in the spring of 1642. His origi- 
nal dwelling, which stood just about where the open court of 
the Produce Exchange now is, on Stone Street, was occupied 
for a short time after the completion of the new one, by 
negroes of the West India Company, but towards the end of 
1642, he sold the materials of the old building to one Uldrich 
Klein. 

Prior to 1646, Roelantsen, taking with him his eldest son, 
then a small boy, had departed for the Netherlands, upon 
what business we are uninformed. During his absence his 
wife Lyntie Martense died, leaving several small children 
(the youngest of whom were only about four and two years 
old respectively), with no one to look after them. Upon the 
9tli of March, 1646, the sad plight of the cliildren was brought 
to the attention of the members of the Council, who after due 
deliberation adopted the somewhat ponderous resolution of 
appointing four of the nearest neighbors — to wit: Philip 
Geraerdy, Dr. Hans Kiersted, Jan Stevensen, the schoolmas- 



64 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

ter, and Oloff Stevensen van Cortlandt — as curators or 
guardians, to look after the children " till the arrival of the 
father or some news of him," 

At last, about the month of July in the same year, Adam 
made his appearance in the ship "St. Jacob" from Amster- 
dam, but he did not come under auspicious circumstances. 
He had first to settle with the authorities for removing some 
of his goods from the public store before they were inspected ; 
and after this he was sued for the board of himself and his 
son during the voyage, by the owner of the vessel: he was 
able, however, to defeat this latter claim by showing that the 
skipper of the " St. Jacob " had promised him his passage " if 
he would perform seaman's work on the vessel, and his son 
said the prayers." 

There may be some just grounds for suspicion that Adam 
Roelantsen was preparing for a new marriage, for in the fall 
of 1646, we find him contracting for new wainscoting and 
other improvements for his house ; if this were the case, his 
plans were seriously interfered with by an untoward occur- 
rence in December of that year. He had about that time 
offered a grievous insult to the wife of one of his neighbors, 
and the matter, taken in connection with Adam's previous 
doings, was brought to the notice of the Council ; after de- 
liberation that body adjudged that he should be publicly 
flogged, and banished from the Colony, as a nuisance. This 
sentence, like many others of the Council, was largely in 
terrorem^ for four days afterwards, or on the i7th of Decem- 
ber, 1646, they entered a further order : " In consideration that 
the aforesaid defendant has four small children, without 
a mother, and a cold winter is approaching, the actual ban- 
ishment of the above sentence is delayed by the Director- 
General and Council until a more favorable opportunity, 
when the defendant may leave the country." Roelantsen 
remained in New Netherland, in fact, for at least three years 
longer, but during the earlier portion of that period he seems 
to have been regarded as a mere privileged prisoner, and per- 
haps was such in a legal point of view. The carousing fiscal, 



ROELANTSEN AND THE FISCAL 65 

or prosecutor, Hendrick van Dyke, seems after a while to 
have found Roelantsen a useful person to attach to himself as a 
sort of servant or lackey ; and in that capacity he had placed 
him, one evening in August, 1647, to keep watch before one of 
the taverns in the town, within which the fiscal was engaged 
in some parting festivities, in all probability, with some of 
his friends who were just on the point of departing on the 
fatal voyage of the " Princess." Just why Van Dyke needed 
a sentinel does not appear, but it is a fair conjecture that he 
feared the austerity of Director Stuy vesant, and was uncertain 
of his standing in the new regime of that magistrate. At 
any rate, the attractions of the tavern proved too strong for 
Roelantsen. " Some time afterwards," says one of the party 
present at the tavern upon this occasion, " said Roelantsen 
came in, and the fiscal asked, 'What are you doing here? 
Why do you not watch at the door ? * Said Roelantsen 
answered there was nothing to watch. The fiscal, replying, 
said, ' You are my servant ; you must wait at the door,' and 
at the same time struck said Roelantsen with the back of his 
hand, and at the same time cried out, ' Throw the blackguard 
out of doors.' Thereupon the above-named Adam Roelantsen 
was thrust out of doors." It may perhaps have been to quiet 
the hubbub caused by this affair that in this same year we 
find Roelantsen appointed provoost, or jailer. He remained 
at New Amsterdam till the latter part of the year 1649 ; on 
the 4th of December of that year, being then apparently on 
the point of embarking for the West Indies, he executed a 
letter of procuration to Jacob Tysen or Marritje Claes " to 
have during his absence a fatherly and motherly care of his 
children, who remain here with them." If he actually left New 
Amsterdam at this time he must have found his way back, 
for in 1653 he appears to have been a " wood sawyer " for 
the Company, employed in its packing house, the old church 
on Pearl Street. He seems to have sunk into the condition 
of a drudge -of the West India Company, but was still at his 
old tricks, for he had an affray with one Stoffel Elsworth 
about the time mentioned and received a severe beating from 

5 



GG NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

him. His house and garden on Brouwer or Stone Street 
had been taken into possession by one Claes Jansen Rust, 
probably a mortgagee, before Roelantsen's departure in 1649, 
for, in August of the same year, it had been sold by the cura- 
tors of the estate of the former, who was then deceased, to 
Captain Willem Tomassen, " Skipper, under God, of the 
' Falconer,' " who held the premises at the period of our survey 
in 1655. 

The description of this building, which stood upon the eastern 
portion of the site of the present Produce Exchange, has been 
pretty clearly preserved to us. It was a clapboard structure, cov- 
ered with a reed roof, and eighteen by thirty feet in size. Like 
most of the buildings in the thickly settled districts, it stood 
with its gable end to the street. At the front door was the usual 
" portal " with its wooden seats. Outside of the frame a chim- 
ney of squared timber was carried up. Within, the fireplace 
was provided with the luxury of a mantelpiece, and we may 
presume that the living room was ornamented with the " fifty- 
one leaves of wainscot," for which Adam Roelantsen had con- 
tracted a few years before. The house contained the usual 
" bedstead " or permanent frame built in, for state occasions, 
being somewhat of the nature of a bunk. It is perhaps a 
little difficult to go back now, in imagination, to the time 
when Adam Roelantsen and his family, upon the first mild 
evenings in spring, could listen from this house to the chorus 
of the " spring peepers " from Blommaert's Vly, along the 
present Broad Street ; what time the air, perhaps, was heavy 
with the smell of burning brush from Barent Dircksen's new 
clearing, just north of Maiden Lane ; yet an unbroken succes- 
sion of human life has, in fact, occupied this spot from such 
period, through nearly nine generations. 

As for Captain Willem Tomassen, he appears to have been 
a resident of New Netlierland prior to 1643, in which year he 
leased from Cornells Dircksen the then recently established 
ferry of the latter to Long Island, together with a house, gar- 
den, and some thirty odd acres of land at the foot of what is 
now Fulton Street, in Brooklyn, but which was then a mere 



CHAPTER VIII 

SURGEON VAN DER BOGAERDT AND HIS HOUSE. — HIS 
TRAGICAL DEATH.-THE PRIVATEER "LA GARCE" AND 
HER PRIZES- ISAAC DE FOREEST 

THERE were sinister memories connected with the house 
on the north side of Stone Street, next to that of Captain 
Tomassen, as we proceed eastward. At the period of our 
survey, in 1655, it was owned and occupied by Isaac de 
Foreest, a man of prominence in the town, but its first owner 
and builder was Harmanus Meyndertsen van der Bogaerdt, for 
several years the surgeon of the West India Company at New 
Amsterdam. 

Few men commenced hfe in New Netherland under more 
favorable auspices than did Surgeon Van der Bogaerdt. Com- 
ing over to the colony in the ship " Eendracht " from Amster- 
dam in 1630, when he could have been hardly more than a 
medical student, he seems to have acquired and to have main- 
tained the confidence of the company's superior officers for a 
long series of years. He appears, indeed, to have had an intimate 
acquaintance with many of the brawls and scandals that took 
place in the town, but probably this was only in the line of 
his professional duties. The Director and Council seem to 
have been disposed to advance Van der Bogaerdt in lines not 
connected with his profession, and in 1639 he made a voyage 
to the West Indies as supercargo of the ship " Canary Bird." 

As to his ancestry in the Netherlands, or as to the particular 
place from wliich he came, we have no definite information. 
From his will, made in 1638, just prior to his voyage to the 
West Indies above referred to, we learn that his wife, Jelisje, 
was the daughter of one Claes Jansen, from Zierikzee, in Zea- 



CAPTAIN WILLEM TOMASSEN 67 

track, winding up a wooded ravine to afford access to the scat- 
tered clearings in the vicinity of Gowanus and of the Wall- 
about. How long Captain Tomassen's connection with the 
ferry lasted we do not know. He was a man of other affairs, 
and in 1647 was skipper of the " Great Gerrit," trading to 
Amsterdam. He seems to have been held in high estimation 
by Director-General Stuyvesant, for soon after the arrival of 
the latter to enter upon his administration at New Amsterdam, 
he appointed, in May, 1647, Captain Tomassen " storekeeper to 
watch over the company's effects," and also commander of the 
company's ships and forces in the absence of the Director-Gen- 
eral. At the time of this appointment, Captain Tomassen gave 
up the command of his vessel ; but two years later, at the time of 
his purchase of the Roelantsen house,we find him in command of 
another ship, the " Valckenier," or " Falconer," not a very large 
vessel, as in 1650, when he brought over one hundred and forty 
passengers on one of his trips from the Netherlands, we are 
informed that he had to leave many behind who were anxious to 
take passage with hun, but for whom there was no room on 
board. In the house which we have described he resided for 
several years, but died within a year or two of the period of our 
survey. He was fond of using the latinized form of Gulielmus 
for his name, which was corrupted by his Dutch neighbors into 
" lelmer," by which appellation he occasionally appears upon 
the old records. 



THE PRIVATEER "LA GARCE" 69 

land, an ancient little to^\^l rich with its memories of desperate 
struggles with the Spaniards ; the fame of its citizen-soldier, 
Lieve Heere, who precipitated himself into the sea voluntarily, 
lest a despatch which he was carrying through the lines of 
the Spanish besiegers should fall into their hands, has been 
the theme of poets in other tongues besides that of the 
Dutch. 

Surgeon Van der Bogaerdt appears to have been related, 
either personally or on the side of his wife, to Claes Cornelissen 
Swits, whose tragical death, upon his solitary bouwery, at the 
hands of an Indian in 1642, was one of the remote causes 
which led up to Kieft's massacre of the Indians in the follow- 
ing year, and to the ruinous struggle which succeeded it. 
About the beginning of the summer of 1642, we find the 
surgeon selling to two Englishmen, James Smith and William 
Brown, his interest as "co-heir" in the plantation of the mur- 
dered man. At about the same time he executed a power of 
attorney to one of his brothers-in-law in the Netherlands to 
collect certain rents for him in the province of Zealand ; but 
whether his interest in these arose in the same manner, 
by reason of the death of Claes Cornelissen, we have no 
information. 

As early as 1645, Surgeon Van der Bogaerdt appears to 
have been living on " the road," as it was then often called, 
the name Brouwer Straet not being as yet in much use ; here 
he had a plot of between fifty and sixty feet front, for which he 
did not obtain his " ground-brief " till the early part of 1647. 
His residence here must have been somewhat interrupted, how- 
ever, for in 1646 he had obtained the important appointment 
of commissary at Fort Orange, or Albany. The surgeon ap- 
pears to have been a man who was somewhat well to do, for 
in the early part of 1647, he had purchased a share in the 
privateering frigate "La Garce," to which a previous allu- 
sion has been made. This vessel, under the command of 
Captain Blauveldt, a very active and enterprising officer, had 
become famous at New Amsterdam (where she paid frequent 
visits) as early as 1644, when Captain Blauveldt captured 



70 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

after a severe conflict, and brought into port, two Spanish 
barks. " La Garce " continued assiduously for several years 
to hunt Spanish prizes, but unfortunately Captain Blauveldt 
was so busy that he apparently had no time to go on shore 
occasionally to get information as to whether the war was 
still continuing between the United Netherlands, whose com- 
mission he carried, and the government of Spain. As a matter 
of fact, the long struggle between those countries was termi- 
nated by a treaty of peace in 1647, in which the independence 
of the Netherlands was at last fully acknowledged ; though 
the great Treaty of Westphalia, which definitively restored 
peace to the larger portion of Europe, was not signed until 
the following year. In view of these events, the people of 
New Amsterdam were astounded to see, in the spring of 1649, 
about a year and a half after the treaty of peace. Captain 
Blauveldt and " La Garce " come sailing proudly up the har- 
bor, bringing with him as a prize the Spanish bark " Tabasco," 
which he had captured in the river of the same name, empty- 
ing into the southern part of the Gulf of Mexico. Captain 
Blauveldt could not understand the scruples that were raised 
about the lawfulness of his capture. He said if there had 
been a treaty of peace with Spain, he had never heard of it. 
Besides that, he said, the Spaniard had never heard of it 
either, and when he summoned her to surrender, had answered 
by firing upon him. Moreover, he insisted, "La Garce," 
though sailing under Dutch colors and owned by Dutch pro- 
prietors, was really a French-built vessel, and France and 
Spain were still at war. The captain's arguments were not 
convincing, however, except possibly to the owners of " La 
Garce." The cause dragged along in the prize courts upon 
one technicality and another for a number of years, and the 
" Tabasco " was at last decided not to have been lawful prize. 
Long before this happened, however, one of the owners, Sur- 
geon Van der Bogaerdt, had ceased to have any interest in 
"La Garce" and her prizes. At Albany, in the winter of 
1647-48, he was accused of a criminal offence of grave nature. 
He took refuge in the Mohawk Country among the Indians, 



DEATH OF SURGEON VAN DER BOGAERDT 71 

with whom he had become well acquainted in the course of 
his official business at Albany, and when a party was sent by 
the magistrates to arrest him he made a determined resistance. 
In the course of the fray, the Indian cabin, in which he had 
fortified himself, which seems to have been a building of some 
size and importance, was set on fire, either accidentally or 
designedly, and Harmanus van der Bogaerdt perished in the 
flames. This affair made a great sensation in New Amster- 
dam, where his wife would seem to have been living at the 
time. The Indians demanded to be reimbursed for the de- 
struction of their building, and in February, 1648, the 
Director-General and Council ordered a part of Van der 
Bogaerdt's garden, upon Stone Street in New Amsterdam, to 
be sold for the purpose of indemnifying the Indians. The 
part sold seems to be the easternmost portion of the exten-. 
sive site of the Produce Exchange. 

Van der Bogaerdt's widow married within a few months after 
his decease one Jean Labatie, or Labbate, as the Dutch called 
him, a person of French extraction, who was at the time 
master carpenter of the West India Company in New Amster- 
dam. They appear to have remained in possession of the 
surgeon's house on Stone Street (which occupied, it would 
seem, a portion of the site of the building No. 11 Stone 
Street, together with a few feet of that of the Produce Ex- 
change) till the latter part of 1652, when they sold it to Isaac 
de Foreest. They had also some claim to the adjoining gar- 
den, previously ordered to be sold by the Council, or had 
themselves redeemed it, for in 1654 they sold out their inter- 
est in that parcel to one Paulus Schrick. Labatie afterwards 
removed to a farm near Albany, and later became one of the 
first settlers at Schenectady. 

Isaac de Foreest and his elder brother Hendrick occupy a 
prominent place in the early history of New Netherland, as 
having been the pioneers of the settlement of Harlem. They 
were both young men when they came over from Leyden to 
New Amsterdam in 1686, — Isaac only about twenty years of 
age, and his brother Hendrick, though a married man, not 



72 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

much older. From the rough, forest-clad hills, seamed with 
deep ravines, a part of which now occupy the north end of 
the Central Park, these two brothers, as they explored the 
island of the Mannhatoes, soon after their arrival, must have 
seen, as they looked to the northward, toward the wide salt-water 
estuary which we now know as Harlem River, a level expanse 
of some seven or eight hundred acres in area, broken only by 
one or two isolated rocky eminences crowned with trees. 
Through the midst of this ran a small fresh-water stream, and 
there is little doubt that portions of the plain had been long 
cleared and cultivated by the Indians. Here Hendrick de 
Foreest selected a tract of about two hundred acres, lying 
between the heights and the little stream flowing through the 
flats, and here, not very far from the present Harlem Lake in 
the Central Park, he commenced the erection of the first 
house of European settlers upon the north end of Manhattan 
island. Isaac de Foreest was probably an assistant of his 
brother in his early operations, but Hendrick soon dying, his 
widow married again, and the bouwery passed into the hands 
of strangers. Isaac de Foreest therefore sought to establish 
a new plantation for himself, and he secured about one hun- 
dred acres of ground, extending in a long, narrow strip for 
nearly a mile from about the present Fifth Avenue and One 
Hundred and Twelfth Street to the river shore in the neigh- 
borhood of First Avenue and One Hundred and Twenty-sixth 
Street. It was near the latter spot that in 1641 he had a 
dwelling and a large tobacco-house built by two English car- 
penters. He obtained a ground-brief or patent for this land 
in 1647. It had probably been devastated by the Indians in 
1643, as most of the outlying plantations were, and whether 
De Foreest kept up his buildings there we do not know. In 
1650 he sold the farm to Willem Beeckman ; it was selected 
for the site of the village of Harlem, and Isaac de Foreest's 
lane, or cart-path, upon the east side of his farm, became the 
main street of the new settlement. 

De Foreest himself, for some time before the last-mentioned 
date, had been dwelling upon the Winckel Straet in New 



ISAAC DE FOREEST, THE BREWER 73 

Amsterdam, where he owned the house next to that of Domi- 
nie Bogardus, to which previous reference has been made, in 
these sketches. Soon after his purchase of Surgeon Van der 
Bogaerdt's house on Stone Street, he sold his former dwelling- 
house upon the Winckel Straet, and continued to make the 
Stone Street house his residence during most of the remainder 
of his life. As early as 1653, De Foreest was known as a 
successful brewer in New Amsterdam, and two or three years 
later he petitioned the Council for permission to contract for 
all the beer that one of his rivals in business could brew, in 
order to save the latter from pecuniary embarrassment. As 
to his place of business in the earlier years we are not in- 
formed, but as early as 1660 his large brewery stood upon the 
north side of the Prinsen Straet, now called Beaver Street, a 
short distance west of the modern William Street. De For- 
eest's brewing operations did not prevent his being engaged 
to some extent in public business, and in 1656 he was ap- 
pointed " Master of the Weigh House." This building, in- 
tended for the weighing, measuring, gauging, etc., of goods 
had been ordered to be constructed in 1653, and stood near 
the little dock upon Schreyers Hoek. It was afterwards re- 
moved to a spot upon the south side of Pearl Street, at the 
head of another small dock on the line of the present Moore 
Street, built about 1659. 

About the time of the surrender of New Amsterdam to the 
English in 1664, Isaac de Foreest incurred considerable cen- 
sure from a part of his fellow-citizens. It seems that while 
the English vessels were lying in the harbor before New 
Amsterdam, with their force as yet unknown, De Foreest was 
taken prisoner, apparently by an English detachment which 
hatl landed upon Long Island and which encountered him at 
that place. He was taken to the ships, but was soon released, 
and sent back to New Amsterdam ; there he reported that 
Colonel NicoU had a force of about eight hundred English 
soldiers ready to make a landing. After the surrender, it was 
discovered (according to the representations made by the 
West India Company to the States-General) that the English 



74 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

only had a few more than two hundred men, — a force hardly 
equal in number to the garrison. There was great indignation 
among the soldiers of the garrison and the more patriotic 
Dutch citizens, and some talk of repudiating Stuyvesant's 
articles of surrender. The Director-General's long course of 
petty tyranny, however, had so alienated the mass of the 
citizens that they seem to have looked upon the arrival of 
the English as a positive relief; they would do nothing, 
and the others had to swallow their indignation as best they 
could. 



CHAPTER IX 

THE VAN CORTLANDT HOMESTEAD. — CATHERINE VAN 
CORTLANDT AND HER CHURCH AT SLEEPY HOLLOW.— 
VAN COUWENHOVENS HOUSES ON STONE STREET.— 
PIETE HARTGERS, THE WAMPUM COMMISSIONER 

UPON the north side of Stone Street there stand two 
unpretendmg brick warehouses of the style of half a 
century ago. Between their high blank walls is a narrow 
lane, or passageway, which seems to lead to nowhere in par- 
ticular, and which is closed to the street by a curious port- 
cullis arrangement of iron bars. The ground covered by 
these buildings, Nos. 13 and 15 Stone Street, and by the 
passageway, together with a small additional strip upon the 
west, forms a spot which ought to be of some interest to a 
good many of the citizens of New York, for it is the ances- 
tral site of one of their oldest families, the Van Cortlandts. 

From the small town of Wyck te Durstadt, a few miles 
southeast of Utrecht, Oloff Stevensen van Cortlandt came 
over to New Amsterdam in 1637 as a soldier in the service 
of the West India Company. Director-General Kieft, who 
came to the Colony in the year succeeding Van Cortlandt's 
arrival, seems to have taken a fancy to the young soldier, 
and transferred him from the military to the civil service, 
giving him the appointment of commissary, or superin- 
tendent of cargoes at the port. The direct compensation of 
this office was not very lucrative, however, for in 1641, his 
salary was raised to 30 guilders, or about $12 per month; the 
probabilities are that his services in the office to which he 
was thus appointed were only needed at the comparatively 
infrequent intervals of the arrival or departure of a vessel in 
port. At any rate, we find him at about this period with a 



76 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

" plantation " on his hands near where the village of Green- 
wich was subsequently located, — the present Ninth Ward 
of the city. Probably enough, this came to him through a 
mortgage from one Thomas Betts, or Bescher, as he is some- 
times called, who seems to have occupied it for a time. This 
man is said to have been an Englishman, and appears to have 
succumbed about this time to the twofold misfortunes of an 
encumbered farm and a worthless wife. In the spring of 
1641, Van Cortlandt leased the plantation to three persons 
who seem to have been Englishmen, for the rental of three 
hundred pounds of tobacco per year. More than by his 
farming investments, however, Van Cortlandt's prospects 
were improved by his marriage in 1642 to Anneken, sister of 
Govert Loockermans, the leading merchant and Indian 
trader of the Colony at that time. Soon thereafter he re- 
ceived from Director Kieft the somewhat important appoint- 
ment of keeper of the public store, and thenceforwards his 
advancement in wealth and influence was quite rapid. 

Van Cortlandt was living upon "the road," or Stone Street, 
as early as 1646, and had obtained his deed or ground-brief 
for the land in the preceding year. In addition to his ap- 
pointments under the West India Company, he was the 
agent for the ex-Director Van Twiller, who, upon his return 
to the Netherlands in about the year 1638, had retained 
quite extensive landed interests in the Colony. Van Cort- 
landt also took a prominent part in the affairs of the church 
at New Amsterdam, of which he was a deacon ; and mention 
has already been made, in a preceding chapter of this work, 
how Director-General Kieft induced him to bring a suit for 
slander against Dominie Bogardus, which suit, however, was 
afterwards settled amicably between the parties. Following 
this affair there seems to have been some diminution of Van 
Cortlandt's influence with the officers of government at New 
Amsterdam ; he was certainly out of his office of keeper of 
the stores as early as the spring of 1647, and in that same 
year he was chosen by the j)opular party of New Amsterdam 
as one of the representative "Nine Men," who afterwards 



OLOFF VAN CORTLANDT 77 

drew up the historic " Remonstrance " to the States-General 
against the misrule of the West India Company and its 
officers in New Netherland. Van Cortlandt signed this docu- 
ment with the remarkable statement appended to his signa- 
ture that it was "under protest." Just what he meant by 
this is not entirely plain, but it appears to have been a sort of 
"hedging" device. The Secretary Van Tienhoven, who 
went over to the Netherlands for the purpose of answering 
the " Remonstrance," on behalf of the colonial authorities, did 
not fail to vilify, after his usual fashion. Van Cortlandt for 
his ambiguous conduct: "He has profited by the Company's 
service," said the Secretary, "and is endeavoring to give his 
benefactor the pay of the world, — that is, evil for good." 

Politics being unsatisfactory, Oloff van Cortlandt now 
appears to have given his attention more particularly to 
private business, and in 1648, according to Valentine, he 
became a brewer. No reference to the site of his brewery is 
found in the Dutch land records. Many years afterwards, 
when the Van Cortlandts had acquired much property in 
the Marketfield Lane, adjoining the rear of their original 
grant upon Stone Street, their breweries and appurtenances 
are referred to as large buildings apparently occupying sites 
in the interior of the block. The lane, or passageway, pre- 
viously spoken of may, indeed, have been the original ap- 
proach to these structures from Stone Street. As to Van 
Cortlandt's house, the records seem to be equally silent. 
Muniments of the family may possibly be in existence which 
could throw light upon these points, but one or two so-called 
descriptions of the ancient buildings which have heretofore 
appeared in print would appear to be entirely fanciful. 

Here, then, Oloff Stevensen van Cortlandt spent many of 
the closing years of his life. If he sometimes remembered 
the village of his last abode in the Netherlands and the 
waters of the Rhine flowing silently by it through the old 
Lech channel which Civilis and the Batavians had excavated 
more than fifteen centuries before ; if he called to mind the 
surrounding lowlands, yellow with the wheat harvest; and 



78 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

the Amersfoort Hills beyond, — quite mountains to the 
Netherlanders, — where white fields of buckwheat checkered 
the purple of the heaths and the green of the woodlands, — 
he never allowed these memories to call him back to the old 
country, though he early acquired an ample competence for 
his day. He remained quietly in New Amsterdam, holding 
the office of Burgomaster of the city for ten years, from 1655 
to 1665, and when the English made their descent upon New 
Amsterdam in 1664, Director-General Stuyvesant appointed 
him one of the commissioners to negotiate the surrender to 
the English. After his death in 1683, members of his family 
long retained this property or a portion of it, but it event- 
ually passed out of their hands. The " brick dwelling-house, 
kitchen, brew-house, malt-house, mill-house, horse-mill, out- 
houses, storehouses, and stables," which stood here in the 
next century, have all disappeared, but an edifice erected by 
Oloff van Cortlandt's daughter Catherine, who was a child 
of two or three years of age at the time of our survey, in 
1655, has been more enduring. The little church of gray 
stone, in the building of which in 1699 she took such a lively 
interest, still stands, much as of old, upon the Albany post- 
road, near the site of the upper manor-house of her husband 
Frederick Phillipse, north of Tarrytown. The ancient road, 
somewhat widened since Catherine van Cortlandt's day, still 
winds around the shady knoll upon which her church stands, 
and climbs the hill beyond ; but the tenants of the manor, the 
slaves of the Phillipses, and the straggling Indian hunters 
who frequented it in her time have long since vanished from 
memory. The few slabs of brown stone scattered here and 
there around the church, when she passed among them, — 

" With slow feet, treading reverently 
The graveyard's springing grass," — 

have expanded, in the course of two centuries, to almost 
a " city of the dead ; " but at the foot of the knoll, the 
Pocantico, enriched with legendary charms by the genius of 
Washington Irving, flows from out its woody solitudes, as 



THE VAN CORTLANDT FAMILY 79 

it did when the foundress of the church looked down upon 
it, — of whom, turning to the list of members in the records 
of this ancient Dutch church, we read : — 

" First and before all, the right honorable, God-fearing, very wise and 
prudent my lady Catharine Phillipse, widow of the lord Frederick Phil- 
lipse of blessed memory, who has promoted service here in the highest 
praiseworthy manner." 

Oloff van Cortlandt's descendants were extensive land- 
holders, and, either directly or by marriage, they controlled 
at one time all the land along the east side of the Hudson 
River, from the highlands above the modern Peekskill to 
the Spuyten Duyvil Creek, a distance of about thirty miles, 
and extending several miles back into the country. Their 
name is perpetuated in that of the town of Cortlandt in 
Westchester County, and in Courtlandt Street and the Van 
Cortlandt Park in the City of New York. 

The interval upon the north side of Stone Street between 
the Van Cortlandt house and the present Broad Street is now 
occupied by buildings fronting upon the latter street, but it 
was not so occupied originally. In the spring of 1645, Peter 
Wolphertsen van Couwenhoven, one of several members of 
a family who came from Amersfoort, only a few miles away 
from Oloff van Cortlandt's last dwelling-place in the Nether- 
lands, obtained a grant from Director Kieft of a plot of 
ground, nearly fifty by one hundred and twenty-five feet in 
area, at the corner of Stone Street and the present Broad 
Street, the latter being at this point, and at the time men- 
tioned, a mere narrow road or lane about twenty-five or thirty 
feet in width, and with an artificial ditch or channel skirting 
its east side. Here Van Couwenhoven built near the corner 
of the streets a modest house — one story and a garret only 
— which in the next year, 1646, he sold to Arnoldus van 
Hardenbergh. He then immediately acquired from the 
Director-General the grant of another parcel of about the 
same size, lying between the first and Van Cortlandt's gar- 
den, and proceeded to build another house here. This he 
held for several years, until 1652, when he sold it to Pieter 



80 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

Hartgers, who was the owner at the period of our survey. 
Hartgers, who had married one of the step-daughters of 
Dominie Bogardus, was engaged much of his time in trading 
with the Indians, and occupied this house very irregularly. 
Finally, he appears to have taken up his residence in Fort 
Orange, or Albany, where he received grants of land, and 
where he was one of the magistrates in 1658. He acquired 
the reputation of a great expert as to the values of the 
Indian wampum, or shell money, and was appointed in 1659 
a commissioner at Albany to estimate the same. His inti- 
mate acquaintance with the Indians led him to make long 
expeditions into the forests to drum up trade with them, a 
course of business which excited great jealousy among his 
less enterprising rivals. He retained the Stone Street house, 
but whether as a storehouse in his business, or in the occu- 
pation of tenants is not known. At the time of the sur- 
render to the English in 1664, Hartgers became obnoxious 
to the new government from some cause or other, — possibly 
from a refusal to take the oath of allegiance, — and his prop- 
erty was confiscated. A curious circumstance, showing the 
scarcity of money in the Colony, is that so late as 1659 this 
house was the subject of a mortgage to secure " three hun- 
dred and thirteen whole beaver-skins." 

As for the corner plot mentioned above, after its sale in 
1646 to Arnoldus van Hardenbergh for 1600 guilders, or 
about $640 of the present currency, it appears to have be- 
come encumbered with debts of its owner to one Hendrick 
Scharf, of Amsterdam, and an arrangement was effected in 
the year 1652 by which the house and garden was turned 
over to the brother of Arnoldus, Johannes Hardenbergh, 
who was at that time a merchant of Amsterdam. He was 
the owner of this property at the time of our survey, but it 
is not certain whether he ever actually resided here. He 
died before the year 1659, in which year the place was sold 
by the curators of his estate, and soon after this date the 
garden was sold off in small lots fronting upon the Graft, 
or Broad Street. 






;i 



V!' 4 




A Plan of BroNwcr Straet and 

JHfoogh Straet in New 

Amsterdam 

from Fort Amsterdam to the Utadt Htiys 
A.D. f6s5 



Compiled from the Dutch and 
English Records by 



J. H. INNES 

aral silts, or those 
the subject i of full txamination, appear in dotted lines. 



> -^ NOT.E — Conjectural sites, or those which have mt been 



R cfe rences : 

Site of original house of Adam Roelantsen. 

" House of the Fiscal." 

Brewery of the IVesI India Company. 

Site of l^an Couaenhoven' s Brewert, /6jS. 

Site of later Me/yn House. 



CHAPTER X 

THE "DITCH," OR GRAFT. — TEUNIS CRATE AND HIS 
HOUSES ON THE DITCH. — THE JEWS IN NEW AMSTER- 
DAM.— SOLOMON LA CHAIR, THE NOTARY, AND HIS 
TAVERN— THE BANISHMENT OF MICHIEL PICQUET 

Ein Jahrtausend sclion imd liiuger 
Dulden wir uns briiderlich ; 
Du, du duldest, dass ich atme, 
Dass du rasest, dulde ich. 

Jetzt wird unsre Freundschaft fester, 
Uud noch tiiglich nimmt sie zu ; 
Deiiii ich selbst begann zu rasen 
Und ich werde fast wie du ! 

Heine: "An Edom." 

IT required some education in the ways of the Nether- 
hmders to render the Graft, or the modern Broad Street, 
at which we have now arrived, a very desirable place of resi- 
dence in the year 1655. The bog or morass towards the 
head of the present street was known as Blommaert's, and 
afterwards as the Company's Vly, in the earlier days of 
the settlement, and had long been an eyesore to the officers 
of the Company. As early as 1638 it appears that measures 
to drain it were in contemplation; and when Director Kieft 
leased the land north of the present Beaver Street to Jan 
Damen, in the spring of that year, the curious reservation 
was made that " in case the Company think proper to plant 
vineyards or gardens in the Vly, the lessee shall permit the 
same." The natural outlet of this swamp was a small fresh- 
water run which emptied into the East River near the inter- 
section of Broad with the present Pearl Street, just south of 
which last-named street was the original shore line. Before 



82 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

1643, an artificial channel or ditch had been constructed to 
carry off the waters of the swamp: this was only a few feet 
in width, and was carried along the middle of the present 
Broad Street; upon its west side there was left a roadway of 
twenty-five or thirty feet in width extending from the shore 
to the present Beaver Street, but upon its east side no such 
roadway appears to have been originally in contemplation, 
for the first grants of land here came in several instances 
quite to the ditch and consequently infringed upon the 
eastern half of the present Broad Street. This was the con- 
dition of the Graft at the period of our survey, but a little 
later, larger views prevailed with the Director and Council, 
and in 1657-59, arrangements were made with the land- 
holders on the east side of the Graft; a strip corresponding 
in size with that upon the west of the ditch was added to the 
street, thus bringing it to its present width, and the ditch 
was widened and deepened so as to form a canal extending 
nearly to Beaver Street, through which canal the tide ebbed 
and flowed. To protect the sides of this canal, it became 
necessary to sheathe it with planks, and this was done by the 
public authorities at considerable expense, and to the great 
dissatisfaction of the property owners along it, who made 
such determined opposition to the collection of the assess- 
ments laid upon them, that the West India Company was 
fain to contribute nearly half of the cost of the work in order 
to prevent public disturbances. 

Low-lying and damp as the " Ditch Street " must have been 
before the construction of the canal in 1657, it doubtless 
possessed attractions for Tennis Craie, who obtained from 
the Director and Council, in April, 1647, a ground-brief for 
a parcel of land at the southwesterly corner of the present 
Stone and Broad streets, being in area about thirty-seven 
feet front on the former street and fifty-five feet on the 
latter. 

Craie, who had come from Venlo, a small border town 
upon the Meuse River in Upper Gelderland, must have been 
among the earlier emigrants, for he had established himself 



TEUNIS CRAIE 83 

in New Amsterdam as early as 1639, in which year, follow- 
ing the curious custom of the colonists and of the West 
India Company, he had hired, or rather leased for six years, 
as the legal instrument expresses it, two milch cows, im- 
ported from the Netherlands by the Company. The rent 
under this singular contract was to be fifty pounds of butter 
annually, and the risk of death of the cattle, and the ultimate 
increase of the same, were to be shared in common by Craie 
and the Company. In all probability he was at this time 
located upon some clearing outside of the village,^ for in the 
winter of 1642-43, just before the Indian war broke out, we 
find him making a contract with one Walter Davel to put 
a post-and-five-rail fence around his plantation. Like most 
of the farmers of Manhattan Island at that period, however, 
his plantation seems to have suffered devastation at the 
hands of the Indians in the war which followed Kieft's cruel 
and foolhardy outrages upon the latter in the early part of 
1643. Driven to the village for security, we find Craie 
looking about for an abode there in the following summer. 
It was no time for building operations, but he found a small 
house which seems to have been in a somewhat dilapidated 
condition, and which stood upon the road along "The Ditch," 
at the northwest corner of the present Bridge and Broad 
streets. It was in all probability the first house built along 
the line of the latter street, and had been originally acquired 
by Abraham Ryken (the ancestor of the Rikers of later days), 
in company with one Jan Pietersen from Amsterdam. These 
persons had sold the house in the spring of 1643 to Michiel 
Picquet, a Frenchman from the ancient city of Rouen in 
Normandy. Picquet, who had a plantation on Long Island, 
did not purpose to occupy this small house himself, and in 
August, 1643, Tennis Craie, searching for a habitation at 

1 This clearing appears to have occupied a portion of the tract lying along the 
East River, between the so-called " Great Bouwery " of the West India Company 
(afterwards granted to Director-General Stuyvesant) and Deutel or " Turtle " 
Bay; — or speaking in a general way, between the modern Twenty-first and 
Forty-fifth streets. This tract passed through many vicissitudes in the earlier 
years of the Colony. 



84 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

the village, was able to hire the house of its owner at the 
yearly rental of 40 guilders, or about $16 ; the rent was 
certainly not exorbitant, but as its owner had only paid 150 
guilders, or about $60, for the premises, it gave him fair 
returns for his investment. In addition Craie agreed "to 
plaster and make the house tight once," and to enclose a 
yard in the rear "to lay wood in." Even this humble little' 
cottage near the fort was looked upon in the troubled condi- 
tion of the times as a place of refuge. The owner stipulates 
in his lease to Craie that "if in consequence of enemies, 
Indians, or other inconveniences, necessity require Michael 
Picquet to lodge in said house with his family and baggage, 
he may do so without deduction of rent." 

Here, then. Tennis Craie apparently resided until he 
acquired the adjoining lot to the north, already spoken of, 
and built a house for himself in or about the year 1647. His 
house, which stood upon the corner of Stone Street, faced 
"The Ditch," or Broad Street with its gabled front, and the 
capacious Dutch oven in its rear about filled up the short lot. 
Just south of the latter appendage, and likewise upon the 
rear of his lot, stood his well, — a famous one in the neigh- 
borhood. To it, and along the south side of his house, 
extended a path, vv'hich subsequently, when in the course of 
a few years he had built another house upon the south- 
ern portion of his ground, and also fronting Broad Street, 
became a gated alleyway between the tvv^o houses, in which 
the formidable "drip" of the steep Dutch roofs produced a 
miniature cascade whenever a hard rain fell. 

The small house of Tennis Craie upon "The Ditch" pos- 
sesses some interest as having been the spot upon which the 
Jews first attempted to establish themselves in the rising 
village of New Amsterdam. The Portuguese Jews — so- 
called — had for a considerable period been numerous and 
influential in Amsterdam, where about twenty years after 
the period of our survey (or in 1674), they built the great 
synagogue, massive and imposing in its simplicity, and 
standing upon a commodious square, bounded on two sides 



THE JEWS IN NEW AMSTERDAM 85 

by broad canals, the Muyder Graft and the Nieuwe Heere 
Graft, — 'One of the choicest locations in the city, from which 
it overlooked, across the latter canal, the greenhouses and trim 
alder hedges and beds of rare plants of the Hortus Medic us, 
the celebrated Botanical Garden of Amsterdam. This divi- 
sion of the Jews of Amsterdam known as the Portuguese, 
embraced, however, many of other nationalities, particularly 
French and Italians. They formed the aristocracy of the 
sect, and were moreover divided by differences of dogma 
from their much humbler brethren, whose modest place of 
worship stood at no great distance from them across the 
Muyder Graft, and bore the formidable appellation of the 
Hoogduytsse Joode Kerk, signifying, however, nothing more 
than the High Dutch Jewish Church, whose congregation, in 
addition to the High Dutch, or Germans, embraced also the 
Polish and Silesian Jews; they had few affiliations with the 
Portuguese. 

In so far as the Jews were merchants and capitalists, their 
presence was by no means unwelcome in the metropolis and 
larger cities of the Netherlands, where every nerve was 
strained to extend the commercial influence of the country; 
but in the colonies, largely composed of the poorer classes of 
emigrants, and where the competition of the Jewish traders 
was dreaded by the small shopkeepers, they were looked 
upon with much less favor; consequently, in November, 
1655, when Asher Levy, a butcher by trade, who afterwards 
became a citizen of prominence, and who was one of the 
pioneers of the Jews in New Amsterdam, petitioned the 
Council that he might be permitted to mount guard with 
the other burghers (during the Indian troubles of that year), 
in place of paying a commutation tax levied upon him as a 
stranger, the privilege was not only refused by Stuyvesant 
and his Council, but the insulting comment was minuted 
upon his petition, that "if the petitioner consider himself 
aggrieved, he may go elsewhere." ^ 

1 The first Jews to arrive in New Amsterdam came in the French bark 
"St. Charles," in the summer of 1654. They were brought by Jacques de la 



86 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

It was about this time that Craie, possibly disturbed by the 
then threatening condition of affairs in the Colony, offered 
at public auction the southernmost of his houses on "The 
Ditch," or the present Broad Street. It was struck down 
to one Salvador d'Andradi, whose name indicates that he 
was one of the Portuguese Jews; the purchaser immediately 
made an application to the Council with the request that he 
might be permitted to take and register his deed for the 
house; permission, however, was refused by that body.^ Craie 
now petitioned the Council to take, by virtue of its right of 
pre-emption, the property off his hands at the figure bid for 
it at public sale, or otherwise to allow him to give his deed 
to the Jewish purchaser, but this was likewise refused by 
the Council. Craie was persistent in the matter, and on the 
14th of March, 1656, having a few days before sold the 
house to Pieter Schabanck and Gysbert van Imbroeck, he 
again applied to the Council, alleging that he was then 
about to sail for the Fatherland, that he had been obliged 
to dispose of his house for a less sum than D'Andradi had 
offered at the auction sale a few months before, and request- 

Motte, the master of the vessel, from the harbor of Bahia in Brazil. They 
numbered, according to a statement made by one of them, Solomon Pieters, 
"twenty-three souls, big and little," but as to what brought this colony from the 
Brazils we have no information. A considerable sum remained due to the 
master of the " St. Charles " for their board and passage, and as the principal 
men among them had signed an agreement whereby they became jointly and 
severally liable for the whole amount, very rigorous proceedings were taken 
against them. An auction sale was held of their goods, and the proceeds being 
insufficient to discharge the indebtedness, two of them, David Israel and Moses 
Ambrosius, were ordered to be taken into confinement and held until the amount 
was made up. Among the sufferers was Asser " Leeven " or Levy, spoken of 
in the text ; all of his goods were sold at auction, although before the sale he 
had offered to pay all charges incurred by himself. The New Amsterdam 
Court held him, however, to be a surety for the debt of all the others. 

1 Salvador d'Andradi was one of several Jewish partners who brought over 
a consignment of goods in the ship " Great Christopher," in the early part of 
1655. The other partners were Abraham de Lucina, David Frera, Joseph 
Dacosta, and one other, whose name has not yet entirely died out in New York, 
— Jacob " Cawyn," or Cohn. They arrived just in time to be roundly taxed 
for the new city fortifications along Wall Street, although, as we have seen, they 
were not allowed to become landholders. 



LA CHAIR, THE NOTARY 87 

ing the Council to reimburse him one half of the difference 
in price; his request again fell upon unsympathetic ears. 
Craie does not appear to have departed for the Netherlands 
at this time; but there is every reason to believe that his 
representations of this affair reached the Directors of the 
West India Company at Amsterdam, who promptly repudi- 
ated the action of Stuyvesant and the Council, and on the 
14th of June, 1656, an order was made permitting the Jews 
to establish a "quarter" in New Amsterdam: their numbers, 
however, remained but small for many years. ^ 

As for Teunis Craie's first-built house upon the corner of 
Stone Street, he sold it about this time to an individual who 
gave him far more trouble than his Jewish purchaser of the 
adjoining premises, and that was to an impecunious gentle- 
man of the legal profession, Solomon Pietersen La Chair by 
name, who seems to have carried on his law office here in 
conjunction with a small tavern, or ale-house, to which his 
huysvrouw, Anneken, attended during his absence on the 
multifarious duties of his profession in the Colony, — duties 
which carried him sometimes to Breuckelen, sometimes to 
Gravesend and occasionally as far as Fort Orange, or Albany. 
For travelling facilities he seems to have made use of a small 
yacht. 

La Chair, of whom many curious particulars were brought 
to light by the discovery in the New York County Clerk's 
Office, some thirty or forty years ago, of his register of busi- 
ness as a notary, and who seems to be regarded by Mr. D. T. 
Valentine as the Father of the Bar of New York, — using of 
course that term in its technical and not in its vulgar sense, 
— was undoubtedly a man of considerable attainments, pro- 
fessional and otherwise, and possessed a very fair business 
knowledge of English. His first appearance in New Am- 
sterdam, so far as we are informed, was in the year 1655, 
when he petitioned the Burgomasters for permission to keep 
tavern in the house of Teunis Craie, then hired by him. 

1 Their synagogue in Mill Street was not established till more than forty 
years after the order of Council above mentioned. 



88 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

It seems very probable that he had just arrived in New 
Amsterdam at this time, and resorted to tavern-keeping until 
he might be better able to gain a footing in the practice of 
the more learned profession. 

The location he had chosen was not an unfavorable one ; 
as he sat at the front of his house in the intervals of busi- 
ness, possibly poring over one of his commentaries on the 
Roman-Dutch law, — in which quotations from the Mosaic 
code, from the Greek and Latin classics, and from the 
Fathers of the Church, were freely intermingled, in a manner 
equally ponderous and bewildering, — he had before him just 
at his right hand the bridge across the Ditch, or " Graft " in 
Broad Street, which was about midway between the present 
Bridge and Stone streets, and over which all persons from 
the Long Island ferry, as well as from the eastern part of 
town, must pass on their way to the Secretary's office and to 
the other government offices near the fort; while beyond the 
bridge, looking over the gardens of three or four houses 
along the shore, he had a clear view of anything that was 
going on around the City Tavern, which served also at this 
time as the Town Hall for public gatherings and the meet- 
ings of the burgomasters, and was also the seat of the 
ordinary courts. 

But, as has been already suggested, La Chair was chroni- 
cally impecunious: he did not pay his rent, and was sued 
for it; he did not pay the wages of the pilot of his yacht, 
and was sued for them ; he did not pay for various articles 
purchased by him, and was sued for the price by the sellers ; 
he did not pay until driven to the last ditch of resistance 
certain fines and taxes imposed upon him, and then he ac- 
companied the payment with such disparaging remarks upon 
the collecting officers — in one case asserting that his money 
was paid to no other purpose than " to have a little cock 
booted and spurred " — that those aggrieved individuals 
found it necessary to lay the matter before the Council in 
order to soothe their wounded feelings; much after the 
manner of their prototype, Dogberry : 



TEUNIS CRAIE'S MISFORTUNES 89 

" Moreover, sir (which, indeed, is not under white and black), 
this plaintiff here, the offender, did call me ass. I beseech you, 
let it be remembered in his punishment." • 

In the same way, when in the early part of 1656 La Chair 
purchased the house he occupied of Tennis Craie, agreeing 
to pay for it in instalments, the sum of 2000 guilders, or 
about $800, — following his usual custom, he allowed him- 
self to be sued for the very first instalment. This seems to 
have been settled at the time, but two years later the owner 
was obliged to bring suit for the last instalment, in answer to 
which La Chair entered the airy plea " that the money was 
ready at one time, but has slipped through his fingers;" it 
appears, in fact, to have slipped through irrecoverably, for 
we soon afterwards find Craie again in possession of his 
house, which in 1660 he disposed of to Oloff Stevensen van 
Cortlandt, La Chair in the mean time having removed to 
another part of the town, where he died a few years later, 
so insolvent that the court pondered a long time as to whether 
a certain elaborate "gown and petticoat" of Anneken, his 
widow, should be sold for the benefit of his creditors, or 
whether they should be left to cheer the widow's heart in 
her second nuptials with one William Doeckles. 

It seems to have been the case that Tennis Craie 's opera- 
tions in real estate in New Amsterdam had not been very 
profitable to him, and he suffered a further misfortune in the 
fact that a woodland tract of some sixty or seventy acres, 
which he had acquired in 1653 upon Long Island (fronting 
the East River, a short distance north of the present Astoria), 
was rendered comparatively worthless to him for many years 
by the order of the Council, in 1656, forbidding isolated 
farms or plantations, in order to prevent depredations by the 
Indians. In 1673 he had obtained a judgment of 186 florins, 
or about $72, against Allard Anthony, the former sheriff, a 
man of considerable political influence; this judgment he 
had been unable to collect for nearly a year, and in 1674 he 
applied to the court for permission to levy on the goods of 



90 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

the late sheriff, " earnestly entreating this Worshipful Court 
once again to take his most pitiable condition into considera- 
tion and to give order that the said Judgment may be put 
into execution without further delay, to the end that he may 
again receive his disbursed mone}^ to use it in nis old age." 

Craie had retained a mere slip of ground upon the south 
side of his original grant, and here he built one of the tiniest 
dwelling-houses ever erected in New York ; ^ the lot upon 
which it stood was less than ten feet front by about forty feet 
deep ; it occupied very nearly the site of the covered drive- 
way of the building No. 92 Broad Street, within which it 
might almost have stood, among the bales of hay and bags 
of feed now occupying that locality. Here Tennis Craie 
appears to have resided for a number of years, partly sup- 
ported by the not very lucrative official employments which 
Mr. Valentine enumerates as having been held by him, such 
as town crier, measurer of apples and onions brought to 
market, and tally-master of the bricks and tiles imported 
from Holland. In 1677, his widow Catrina conveyed the 
small house above mentioned to the deacons of the Reformed 
Church, in consideration of her support and maintenance, 
she being then poor and aged. She had died prior to 1682, 
in which year the officers of the church disposed of the 
property. 

However much Tennis Craie might have felt 

" The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune," 

he was lucky in comparison with his neighbor and former 
landlord, Michiel Picquet, whose humble house stood at the 
northwest corner of the present Bridge and Broad streets, as 
previously described. This man had endeavored, in his lease 
to Craie, as we have already seen, to guard himself against 
"enemies, Indians, or other inconveniences," — but he failed 

1 A smaller one is, however, to be seen at present (1900) in Stone Street, 
upon the rear of the old Stadt Huys ground. This diminutive structure, known 
3S No. 32^ Stone Street, has only about seven feet front. 



PICQUET PUT TO THE TORTURE 91 

to provide against one of the worst inconveniences of all, — 
namely, that of an unbridled tongue. He appears, in fact, 
to have been something of what the good Dame Quickly, 
of Eastcheap, held in such abhorrence, — namely, a "swag- 
gerer." In common with most of the citizens who had 
suffered from the Indian wars, he entertained a bitter hatred 
of Director Kieft, and he appears to have been a warm 
partisan of his neighbor, just over " the Ditch " in Broad 
Street, — Cornelis Melyn, the leader of the opposition to the 
arbitrary despotism of Kieft and of Stuyvesant. Soon after 
Stuyvesant's arrival at New Amsterdam, in the early part of 
the summer of 1647, and before Kieft had sailed for the 
Netherlands on the fatal voyage of the "Princess," Picquet 
was accused of having berated Kieft as "a betrayer of his 
country, a villain and traitor; and saying if nobody would 
shoot him, he (said Picquet) would do it himself; that his 
legs should never carry him out of the country; that Cornelis 
Melyn had full a hundred men at his command, and there 
would be great bloodshed on the spot where the ex-Director 
surrendered his authority to General Stuyvesant; and if the 
latter did not behave himself better than the old Director, 
he, too, should pass under the door; (striking under his 
arm)," — a somewhat vulgar allusion to the standard method 
of punishment of refractory small boys. 

Although this style of talk was probably a fair sample of 
the ordinary ale-house discussions of the period, and although 
it was generally winked at by the authorities in the case of 
any person likely to have influence enough to carry his com- 
plaints to the home country, it was not to be endured in the 
case of this obscure Frenchman. Picquet was taken into 
custody " for that scandalous and godless act, " and was, in 
fact, ordered to be put to the torture, — probably for the 
purpose of extracting information respecting the matters 
hinted at in his vaporings. It should not be forgotten, in 
this connection, that the history of New York goes back to 
the time when the rack was an acknowledged feature of 
judicial procedure. 



92 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

Some kind of settlement was made of this affair, and 
Picquet received Director-General Stuyvesant's pardon, but 
his rancor had apparently not abated, and he had profited 
but little by his former experience, for in a short time he was 
again placed under arrest, charged with saying that he would 
shoot the Director between his bouwery (at the present 
Ninth Street) and the fort. The ignorant and probably weak- 
minded character of this man is pretty well shown by the 
record of his examination taken upon this occasion. When 
asked what he had to say, he declared that the witnesses 
against him were unworthy of belief because they "had 
stolen watermelons and some boards. Asked if he could 
prove it, says he has no proof, but that God was his wit- 
ness." The trial of this case was attended with one public 
benefit; it displayed at a very early date in his administration 
the thoroughly hypocritical character of the new Director- 
General. Stuyvesant, at first, with a great parade of his vir- 
tue, refused to sit as a judge upon the trial on account of his 
personal interest in the matter. Afterwards, finding in all 
probability the other members of the Council too leniently 
disposed to suit his views, he sulkily took his seat with the 
others, and was the only member of the court who voted that 
a sentence of death should be passed upon the prisoner. 
The judgment of the court was sufficiently severe, however; 
Michiel Picquet was sentenced to be transported to Holland 
on the ship "Falconer," to serve a term of eighteen years' 
imprisonment in 't Rasphuis, the criminal prison of Amster- 
dam, so-called from the common occupation of the prisoners 
at that time in rasping the heavy Brazil wood into dust for 
dyeing purposes. 

Before the sailing of the vessel, however, the prisoner 
made his escape from Fort Amsterdam. The Council, with 
a polite attention to form, somewhat similar to that of 
the executioner's clownish assistant, calling the condemned 
criminal to execution, in " Measure for Measure " : " you 
must be so good, sir, to rise and be put to death," — ordered 
Picquet to be summoned three times "by the ringing of 



BANISHMENT OF PICQUET 93 

the bell, to come and defend his case." That obstinate and 
unaccommodating individual having failed to appear, how- 
ever, the Council proceeded, on July 4, 1647, to do the best 
it could in vindication of its slighted authority by passing a 
further sentence of banishment against Picquet, and of con- 
fiscation of his property. His house at the corner of Bridge 
and Stone streets is soon found — probably by direct grant 
from the Director and Council — in the possession of Hen- 
drick Willemsen, a baker, who occupied the premises for 
many years. ^ 

1 As for Picquet, he must have subsequently either surrendered himself or 
been captured ; for in the fall of 1647 he, together with the Scotchman, Andrew 
Forrester, agent of the Earl of Stirling, who had been imprisoned by the autlior- 
ities at New Amsterdam, for asserting his principal's claim to Long Island was 
sent away in the ship " Valckenier " for transportation to the Netherlands. The 
vessel, however, on its way, touched at an English port, and while there, both the 
prisonei-s made their escape. (Letter of the Directors, etc., to General Stuy- 
vesant, dated April 7, 1 648.) 



CHAPTER XI 

CORNELIS MELYN, PATROON OF STATEN ISLAND.— THE 
INDIAN TROUBLES.— JOCHEM PIETERSEN KUYTER.— 
THE STRUGGLES OF MELYN AND KUYTER AGAINST 
THE COLONIAL AUTHORITIES. — THE BARON VAN DER 
CAPELLEN— SIBOUT CLAESEN, OF HOORN 

He was one 
Of many thousand such that die betimes, 
Whose story is a fragment known to few. 
Then comes the man who has the luck to live, 
And he 's a prodigy. Compute the chances, 
And deem there 's ne'er a one in dangerous times 
Who wins the race of glory, but than him 
A thousand men more gloriously endowed 
Have fallen upon the course ; a thousand others 
Have had their fortunes foundered by a chance, 
Whilst lighter barks pushed past them. 

Taylor : " Philip Van Artevelde." 

IT has been already stated that the bridge over the little 
stream in Broad Street was originally a short distance — 
some fifty feet or thereabouts — north of Bridge Street. This 
location carried the road towards the ferry around a parcel of 
land situated upon the river shore, upon which stood the house 
of a man who for half a score of years filled a very conspic- 
uous position in the public eye, — Cornelis Melyn, of Antwerp.^ 
There is something about the determined character of 
Cornelis Melyn, and the long struggle which he candied on 
against the petty despots who represented the authority of the 

1 The name Melyn, like so many others of the modern family names among 
persons descended from a Germanic ancestry, is quite likely to have been derived 
from some former place of residence of the family, which in this case, it is not 
improbable, was the village of Melin, about sixty miles southeast of Antwerp, in 
the direction of Maestricht, from which it is not far distant. 



ANTWERP IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 95 

West India Company in New Amsterdam, which lends an air 
of historic dignity to the man, and marks liim as one of the 
first of a long line of champions in the colony, of individual 
rights, as against arbitrary and irresponsible power. He came 
naturally by his hatred of despotism. At his native Antwerp, 
in the first half of the seventeenth century, he could have 
talked with men who remembered when it was not unusual 
for two thousand vessels or more to be lying in the port of 
that city, or for a hundred to sail up the Scheldt with each 
favoring tide. They could have told him of misfortune after 
misfortune under the Spanish rule, of wars and grinding taxes, 
of the introduction of the Inquisition, of the dreadful sack 
of the city by the mutinous Spanish garrison in 1576, when 
six thousand of the citizens perished by the sword, by fire, and 
by water ; and he himself could have seen how the growth of 
the commerce of Amsterdam, after its emancipation from the 
Spanish incubus, had drawn away to itself the trade and the 
most enterprising of the tradesmen of Antwerp. Now, as he 
trod the streets of the city, their spaciousness contrasted 
strangely with the soUtude that reigned in them ; he passed 
by quaint old mansions, of which the half were closed and 
uninhabited; but few vessels were to be seen now in the 
Scheldt or along the canals, and upon the quays the grass 
grew ; the busy crowds had forsaken the great Exchange, and 
there were seen there now "little more than peddlers and 
fishwomen." There was one spot in the city which must have 
stirred strongly the feehngs of Cornelis Melyn, and that was 
where a tall crucifix of gilt bronze, marked, according to 
story, the site of the insulting statue erected half a century 
before, by order of the bloody Duke of Alva, where he himself, 
in full armor, was shown as trampling upon two prostrate 
figures, designed to represent the lords and commons of Flan- 
ders. The statue had perished long before in a tumult of the 
indignant citizens, but the memory of it was not likely soon 
to fade away in the decaying city. 

And yet Antwerp still retained much of its former charm : 

" A gilded halo, hovering round decay," 



96 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

which had induced John Evelyn, visiting it about this time, 
to speak of it in his diary as " sweete Antwerp " — " nor did 
I ever observe a more quiet, cleane, elegantly built and civil 
place than this magnificent and famous citty of Antwerp." 
From the well-known station of view across the Scheldt, 
called, " Het Vlaamshe Hoofd," the Point of Flanders, and 
seen in a bright afternoon, when the rays of the declining 
sun threw into light and shadow the quaint carvings of the 
old mansions, of the churches and public buildings, and of the 
wonderful spire of the cathedral, towering more than three 
hundred feet above them all, the city lay stretched along the 
Scheldt like a gilded pageant. 

Within the city, too, still dwelt men of genius and of learn- 
ing ; indeed, in Melyn's day, Antwerp had attained the height 
of its great artistic fame, and he may have often seen or talked 
with Rubens, Van D3'ke, and Teniers, chief of a long line of 
predecessors and of followers in the painters' art. Still, what- 
ever pleasant memories might cluster about the old city, its 
prospects under foreign rule were becoming darker and darker ; 
and Cornelis Melyn, a man of competent means and past his 
younger years, — he was born about the year 1602, — deter- 
mined, doubtless not without some pangs, to try his fortunes 
in the New World. Leaving his family in Europe, he sailed 
for New Amsterdam in 1639. Here his attention was attracted 
to the rounded, forest-clad hills and intervales of Staten Island, 
and to its wide plains, upon which only one or two grants of 
land, and those of no great extent, had as yet been made. He 
sent an application next year to Amsterdam for a grant from 
the West India Company to himself of the remainder of the 
island. This was favorably entertained, and he thereupon 
brought on liis family from the Netherlands and set to work 
vigorously to take the arduous steps necessary for developing 
his tract. In 1642 he received his ground-brief or patent for 
the island, upon which he had already established a number of 
settlers, among whom, as it is supposed, he himself resided. 

The period in which Melyn began the clearing for his plan- 
tations upon Staten Island was an inauspicious one. The good 



THE RARITAN INDIANS 97 

understanding which had prevailed between the Dutch and 
the native Indians for many years after the first settlement of 
the former had begun to be seriously disturbed as the colonists 
grew stronger and became more aggressive. It was in the year 
1640, and in all probability soon after Melyn had made his 
application to the West India Company for land upon Staten 
Island, that a party of Raritan Indians, whose haunts were 
upon that island and upon the mainland in the vicinity of the 
river which still bears their name, was charged with having 
committed some petty depredations upon the plantation of 
David Pietersen de Vries, who had already commenced a clear- 
ing upon the grant of land he had obtained on the island. To 
punish the savages for this affair (which appears to have been 
greatly exaggerated, even if the charges were not wholly 
untrue), Kieft, who seems to have been painfully conscious 
that he had done nothing as yet to distinguish himself in his 
office, now determined to send an expedition against these 
Indians. The party was headed by Secretary Van Tienhoven, 
whose treacherous and cruel disposition was well adapted for 
matters of this kind. The force numbered seventy men, and 
taking the Indians by surprise at their villages — which seem 
to have been in the neighborhood of the present Perth Amboy, 
or Woodbridge — they slaughtered several of the savages, and 
burned the crops in their fields. Van Tienhoven and his band 
of Dutch warriors returned to New Amsterdam, it is true, 
unharmed and in high feather after this feat ; but the " heathen " 
Raritans, as Kieft was fond of calling them, were upon one 
point just about as fully enlightened as their Christian ene- 
mies. They understood thoroughly the lex talionis, and they 
had, moreover, abundant opportunities for putting it in prac- 
tice. They soon found their opportunity, and attacked the 
lonely plantation of De Vries upon Staten Island, where they 
killed four of his tobacco planters, destroyed the crops, and 
fired the buildings. The parties were now in one sense quits ; 
the Indians were henceforth upon their guard, and any further 
expeditions against them were not likely to be attended by 
success. In this emergency Kieft bethought himself of hiring 



98 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

the other Indians to murder the Raritans ; the Council makes 
a report on the 4th of July, 1641 : " Wherefore, considering 
the circumstances, we have adopted the means which seem to 
us best suited to the emergency, viz. : To secure the help of 
our Indian allies in their (the Raritans') neighborhood, over 
whose territory the enemy must cross," — that is, in attempt- 
ing to reach New Amsterdam, — " and who may stop them in 
their wild forays, or at least give timely notice of their ap- 
proach. And in order to encourage them the more, and lure 
them with greater ardor to espouse our cause, we engaged to 
pay them, for every head of a Raritan, ten fathoms of sewant," 
— worth about seventeen dollars of the present currency, — 
" and for every head of any of those who murdered our people 
on Staten Island, twenty fiitlioms of sewant." These measures 
had little effect except to further enrage the Indians against 
Kief t and the Dutch. It was under these inauspicious circum- 
stances that Cornelis Melyn began his settlement upon Staten 
Island. 

He seems to have remained unmolested by the Indians for 
a considerable time, and this was doubtless owing to the 
numerical strength of his colony. We have no exact infor- 
mation upon this point, but as he had spent large sums of 
money in furnishing stock and implements, he had undoubt- 
edly secured a goodly number of colonists. At tliis period 
he was evidently in harmony with Director-General Kieft, 
who apparently had private business relations with him. 
Indeed, it is said that his refusal to admit Kieft to full part- 
nership in his Staten Island venture was one of the causes of 
the Director-General's bitter hatred of him afterwards, — 
though this is abmidantly explained by other causes. 

In the mean time, trouble was threatened in another quar- 
ter. This grew out of the murder, in the summer of 1641, of 
Claes Cornelissen Swits, commonly known as Claes Rade- 
maker, or Claes the wheelwright, by an Indian of the Weck- 
quaskeek tribe of Indians, inhabiting the shores of the 
Hudson, in the lower part of the present Westchester County. 
The murder is supposed to have been an act of private re- 



KIEFT'S PLANS AGAINST THE INDIANS 99 

venge for the slaying and robbery of an uncle of the mur- 
derer many years before, by some of the lawless Europeans 
infesting the settlement, the Indians having failed to obtain 
any redress from the Dutch authorities. A prompt demand 
was made upon the tribe for the surrender of the murderer of 
Claes Cornelissen. This, however, was not complied with, 
the Indians claiming, probably enough with truth, that he 
was out of their reach. 

At this time, according to the Memorial afterwards pre- 
sented to the West India Company, on behalf of the people 
of New Amsterdam, " a hankering after war had wholly 
seized on the Director," and the affair of Swits seems to have 
afforded Kieft a long sought for opportunity to carry out his 
plans. It is rather difficult to understand the tortuous policy 
of this man. That he was desirous of ridding the vicinity of 
New Amsterdam of the troublesome native tribes and of get- 
ting possession of their lands as one of the fruits of conquest, 
is quite evident ; on the other hand, making due allowance 
for the blind arrogance so frequently shown in dealings by 
individuals of a so-called " dominant race " in their dealincrs 
with a supposed inferior one, Kieft must have been well 
aware that acts of violent and wholesale aggression against 
the Indians would inevitably be resented by them, and that 
in such case their power of inflicting injury upon the scat- 
tered colonists and their farms would be most formidable. It 
is difficult to reach any other conclusion than that the Di- 
rector-General meant, from the first, to entrap the neighboring 
Indians and to exterminate them at one blow, if possible, 
trusting that, afterwards, distance and dissensions among the 
tribes would prevent retaliation from the remoter Indians. 

The business was by no means an easy one, however. If 
he succeeded, he miglit doubtless expect to go down to pos- 
terity as a hero and a great promoter of civilization ; but, on 
the other hand, if he should fail, and disastrous results to the 
colony should ensue, there would be a heavy account to settle 
with his superiors, the West India Company. Under these 
circumstances, he craftily determined to try to implicate the 

: L.crc. 



100 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

whole body of colonists in the onslauglit he was preparing 
to make upon the Indians, and to make it appear that he 
was merely acting at their instance and request, thus re- 
lieving himself from liability for the bloody experiment. 
Accordingly, on the 29th of August, 1641, the " heads of 
families " in New Amsterdam, who had previously had un- 
commonly little to say about the affairs of the community, 
were startled by having certain propositions publicly sub- 
mitted for their discussion by the benevolent Director- 
General and his Council, to the following effect: 

" 1. If it is not just that the murder lately committed by a 
savage upon Claes Swits be avenged ; and in case the Indians 
will not surrender the murderer, if it is not just to destroy 
the whole village to which he belongs ? 

" 2. When and in what manner this should be executed ? 

" 3. By whom can it be effected? " 

The occasion was a momentous one : the citizens met and 
appointed a committee of twelve, composed of some of the 
most energetic individuals among them, this committee form- 
ing the somewhat celebrated body known as "the Twelve 
Men;" at their head was Coi'nelis Melyn. Most of tlie 
members of this body were men who had much at stake in 
the event of hostilities with the natives. They appear to 
have understood Kieft's design from the first, but their posi- 
tion was a difficult one : if they should advise the Director and 
Council against attempting to enforce by violence their claims 
against the Indians, they knew that they would be charged at 
once with pusillanimity, lack of patriotism, and disaffection 
to the government by the Director and his Council, following 
the usual custom of those in authority when tlieir line of 
governmental action, (no matter how unjust, impracticable, 
or dangerous it may be), is opposed or criticised by the sub- 
ject : furthermore, it might have a bad effect upon the natives 
to place themselves formally upon record as being opposed to 
the employment of force. 

Accordingly, with all these things in view, they drew up, in 
the fall of the same year, 1641, an answer to the Director's ques- 



COMMITTEE OF "THE TWELVE MEN" 101 

tions, in which answer considerable astuteness was displayed. 
In this document the Committee, while assenting to the use of 
force if necessary against the Indians, recommend many safe- 
guards in the way of peaceable demands, mild demeanor towards 
the natives, etc., and linally an expedition against them (prob- 
ably for the purpose of securing hostages), when the Indian 
warriors should be absent on their hunting expeditions. The 
sting to the Director-General, however, lay in the following 
clause : " That as the people recognize no other head than 
the Director-General, therefore they prefer that he should 
lead the van, while they, on their part, offer their persons to 
follow his steps and to obey his commands." 

The Director-General had been outwitted: the answer of 
" the Twelve > Men " was coldl}^ received by him, and no 
measures of importance were taken for a considerable period 
against the Indians. Melyn and his committee, however, 
proceeded further, and therein seems to lie their great mis- 
take. In their appointment by the people, though it had really 
been made only for a special and limited purpose, they 
thought they saw an opportunity for establishing a popular 
voice in the affairs of the colony, which had hitherto been 
entirely lacking. Accordingly, on the 21st of January, 1642, 
" the Twelve Men " sent in a petition to the Director-General, 
designating themselves as " Selectmen on behalf of the Com- 
monalty of New Netherland," — and praying for a redress of 
certain grievances ; they requested that " the Council shall 
from this time be rendered complete in members, especially 
as the council of a small village in Fatherland consists of 
five and seven schepens ; that, from now henceforth, the 
Director and Council do not try any criminals, unless five 
Councillors be present, inasmuch as the Commonalty talk 
considerably about it ; " they further request that representa- 
tion should be had in the meetings of the Council, " so that 
taxes may not be imposed on the country in the absence of the 
Twelve." 

Kieft was furious ; the body which he had created to 
further his own crooked designs had not only thwarted him 



102 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

in them, but now was insolently attempting to interfere in his 
favorite method of government, wliich was the absolute con- 
trol of affairs by himself, with two or three dependent and 
obsequious councillors to use as " buffers," to protect himself 
from injury; a few days after the receipt of this petition, he 
made a brusque order, forbidding " the Twelve Men " from 
holding any further meetings.^ 

Matters ran along in this way until the following winter, 
when the Weckquaskeek Indians, fleeing before the raid of 
the Mohawks from the north, sought refuge in the vicinity of 
New Amsterdam, as has been already noticed.^ Kieft was 
now in high spirits : his long-sought opportunity for exter- 
minating the Indians was at hand; he seems to have per- 
suaded himself that Providence had been playing directly 
into his hands, but still he did not wish to rely entirely upon 
Providence ; he must have some means of implicating the 
people at large in the business ; but this was not an easy 
matter, since he had forbidden the committee which they had 
appointed from holding any meetings, and he knew very 
well that if he should call them together again, they would in 
all probability disapprove of a general massacre of the Indians. 
He concluded, under these circumstances, to adopt what was 
perhaps one of the most impudent tricks ever devised by men 
in authority to try to give an appearance of justification to 
their own unwarrantable acts. There was much public gos- 
sip respecting a certain Shrovetide dinner, about this time 
(February, 1643), at the farmhouse, on Broadway near the 
present Pine Street, of Jan Damen, — one of the Committee 

1 "February 8th, 1642. — Whereas the Commonalty, at our request, appointed 
The Twelve to communicate their good counsel and advise on the subject of the 
murder of Switz, and this being now completed we do hereby thank them for the 
trouble they have taken, and shall, with God's help, make use of their rendered 
written advice in its own time. . . . The said twelve men shall now henceforth 
hold no further meeting, as tlie same tends to a dangerous consequence and to 
the great injury, both of the country and our authority. We do therefore hereby 
forbid them calling any manner of assemblage or meeting, except by our express 
order, on pain of being punished as disobedient subjects." 

2 See page 22, ante. 



MASSACRE OF THE INDIANS 103 

of Twelve, — at which were present, with Kieft, Cornells van 
Tienhoven, the secretary, and Abraham Verplanck (two of 
the sons-in-law of Damen), and Maryn Adriaensen, a sort of 
dependant and debtor of the latter ; at this dinner the Shrove 
pancakes were, it was said, washed down with mysterious 
toasts to the success of some great enterprise which was on 
foot. 

However this may be, a petition was entered upon the 
minutes of the Council in the following remarkable terms : 

To the Honorable Willem Kieft, Director-General of New Nether- 
land, and his Honorable Council : — 
The whole of the freemen respectfully represent that though 
heretofore much iunoceut blood was spilled by the savages without 
having had any reason or cause therefor, yet your Honors made 
peace on condition tliat the chiefs should deliver the murderer 
into our hands (either dead or alive), wherein they have failed up 
to the present time : the reputation which our nation hath in other 
countries has thus been diminished, even notwithstanding innocent 
blood calleth aloud to God for revenge ; we therefore request your 
Honors to be pleased to authorize us to attack the Indians as 
enemies, whilst God hath delivered them into our hands; for 
which purpose we offer our persons. This can be effected at one 
place by the freemen, and at the other by the soldiers. 
Your Honor's Subjects, 

(Signed) Maryn Adriaensen 
Jan Jansen Damen 

Abm Planck. 
(Lower stood) 

By their authority 

Corns van Tienhoven, Secretary. 

The savage massacre of the Indians followed, and then the 
swift retaliation upon the Dutch, which in the course of a 
few months reduced the thirty or forty farmhouses on Man- 
hattan Island to four or jfive which still remained standing, 
and which drove in the survivors of the Indian depredations 
to dwell in " huts of straw " around Fort Amsterdam. The 
number of colonists at Cornells Melyn's settlement upon 



104 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

Staten Island seems to have retarded its fate for a time. It 
was still unattacked as late as October, 1643, though " hourly 
expecting an assault," — which soon afterwards came, and 
left it a desolate waste. Melyn had, in the mean time, 
removed his family to New Amsterdam, and sought out a 
place of abode there. 

East of " the Ditch " in Broad Street lay a low rise of 
land along the East River ; towards the shore, it terminated 
in a crumbling bank of no great height, above the stony 
beach, and at a distance of about two hundred and fifty feet 
back from the shore, it fell away into a low and damp depres- 
sion, whicli formed an easterly arm to the swamp occupying 
the vicinity of Broad Street, and which was called, in the 
early days of the colony, " Blommaert's Vly," as has already 
been stated. Along the middle of this low ridge, the officers 
of the Company had established the road leading out from the 
bridge to the ferry to Long Island. It soon acquired the 
name of Hoogh Straet, — the High Street; after the sur- 
render to the English in 1664, it gradually came to be called 
Duke's Street, in honor of the Duke of York ; and at present 
it forms the easterly portion of Stone Street, being nearly 
a continuation of the street originally known by that name. 
Upon the south side of this street, just west of the present 
Coenties Alley, and situated well back towards the shore, the 
Director and Council had erected, in 1641, the commodious 
building known as the Great Tavern, afterwards in part used 
as the Town Hall, of which further notice will be taken here- 
after. From the present Broad Street to the Great Tavern, 
all the land lying between the Hoogh Straet and the shore 
had been taken up, at an early date, by two individuals, one 
of whom was Burger Jorissen, a man of prominence in the 
town, who had built a house here, and i-eceived a ground-brief 
for it in 1643 ; he occupied a plot of about one hundred and 
thirty-five English feet frontage, next adjoining the tavern. 
The other occupant was located upon a much smaller plot, 
about at the corner of the present Broad Street ; this was one 
Eben Reddenhaus, a German from the principality of Waldeck, 



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CORNELIS MELYN'S HOUSE 105 

who had recently (in 1641) married in New Amsterdam, 
and built a house here, but who died soon afterwards. There 
remained but one more available parcel along the river in this 
vicinity, and that one covered the end of the present Broad 
Street, at that time (as already stated) not designed to be 
kept open as a street. Of this parcel, Cornelis Melyn received 
a ground-brief in 1643 ; it was about sixty-two English feet 
in front along the road, which with the bridge lay north of it, 
and it extended in depth about eighty-eight English feet to 
the river shore ; through it the stream or ditch from Blom- 
maerts Vly ran into the East River. 

Here, then, Cornelis Melyn built his house, evidently a 
modest one, designed only for occasional use in troublesome 
times. It would appear to have been a two-story house of 
small size ; in all probability built of brick. This house was 
removed about 1657, when the authorities determined to 
change the ditch in Broad Street into a " Graft," or canal, 
with a roadway on each side of the same ; its location appears 
to have been in the easterly half of the present Broad Street, 
midway between Stone and Pearl streets. Desiring to con- 
trol more land in this vicinity than his original small plot, 
Melyn bought, in August, 1644, from the widow of Eben 
Reddenhaus, for the sum of 250 guilders, or about $100, her 
house and ground, and in December of the same year, from 
Burger Jorissen, his house and larger parcel for 950 guilders, 
or $380, so that he now owned all the land along the river 
from " the Ditch " to the City Tavern. 

Melyn's residence in New Amsterdam, taken in conjunc- 
tion with the forlorn condition of the colonists, seems to have 
stimulated him to more active exertions. In the fall of 1643, 
he, with his associates, then known from their number as " the 
Eight Men," addressed Memorials both to the States-General 
of the Netherlands and to the West India Company, setting 
forth the melancholy state of their affairs, and depicting in 
vivid colors the ravages of the Indians ; they tell how " daily 
in our houses and fields have they cruelly murdered men and 
women, and with hatchets and tomahawks struck little chil- 



106 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

dren dead in their parents' arms or before their doors, or car- 
ried them away into bondage ; the^houses and grain barracks 
are burnt with the produce ; cattle of all descriptions are slain 
and destroyed, and such as remain must perish this approach- 
ing winter for want of fodder. Almost every place is aban- 
doned. . . . We wretched people must skulk with wives and 
little ones that still survive in poverty together, in and around 
the fort at the Manhattans, where we are not safe even for 
an hour." These Memorials, however, contained something 
in the nature of a threat, which, while it was natural enough 
under the circumstances, was probably not well advised: 
" Should suitable assistance not arrive (contrary to our ex- 
pectations), we shall through necessity, in order to save the 
lives of those who remain, be obliged to betake ourselves to 
the English at the East, who would like nothing better than 
to possess this place." These suggestions, though possibly 
they may not have had much effect upon the members of the 
States-General, seem to have sunk deeply into the minds of 
some of the Directors of the West India Company, and to 
have created with them a prejudice against the memorialists, 
which afterwards bore bitter fruit for the latter. 

In the mean time, Kieft had been bestirring himself to clear 
away the odium for the Indian massacre from his name, and 
to make it appear that it had been the work of the people, in 
opposition to his own personal views ; and he had sent ac- 
cordingly to the West India Company a pamphlet containing 
a rdsum^ of the whole affair, which pamphlet, according to 
Dominie Bogardus, " contained more lies than lines." The 
effrontery of the man was so amazing that in 1644 Melyn and 
his associates determined to send a private communication 
or memorial to the West India Company directing their atten- 
tion to the falsehoods which Kieft was endeavoring to dis- 
seminate. This document, bearing date 28th October, 1644, 
though drawn up under circumstances of great provocation, 
contained much vituperation of Kieft and his advisers, and 
proved to be the source of much trouble for Cornells Melyn, who 
was considered, probably with justice, as having been its author. 



CAPTAIN KUYTER 107 

Although the proceedings of " the Eight Men " were con- 
ducted with secrecy, and though Kieft does not appear to 
have been aware for a considerable period of the communi- 
cation of 1644 to the West India Company, there seems to 
have been early manifested a bad state of feeling on his part 
towards Cornells Melyn, which displayed itself in various petty 
annoyances towards the latter. In 1645, he was charged by 
the fiscal with having sold wine to the Indians, but nothing 
appears to have come of the affair. Melyn had at this time 
leased about two acres of ground from the officers of the 
Company, covering the site of the present Trinity Church 
and the northern portion of the churchyard, and extending 
to the river bank. This he employed for the purpose of 
raising grain, evidently for his family use. On the 31st of 
May, 1646, Kieft and his Council, pettishly alleging that 
Melyn, " having planted and fenced a piece of land north of 
the Company's garden, taking in more ground than belonged 
to him, sweeping away with a curve behind said garden, and 
making use of the sods and earth of the Company's soil for 
security of said land," ordered that " he may cut his grain, 
and then deliver up the Company's ground in the same con- 
dition as in the Spring." 

In the mean time, Cornells Melyn acquired, at about this 
period, a neighbor who was to prove a faithful ally to him, 
and whose fortunes were to be bound up together with his 
own for several years to come. This was the worthy Captain 
Jochem Pietersen Kujiier, an ex-sea-captain in the Danish 
service, and one of the pioneers of the settlement at Harlem. 

The humble cottage of Eben Reddenhaus, which had been 
bought by Melyn, as above stated, and which stood near 
the northeast corner of the present Pearl and Broad streets, 
was in a siiort time sold by him to one Seger Teunissen. 
This man was soon afterwards killed by the Indians, and 
upon the West India Company's officers taking charge of his 
property, they found in a trading " yacht " belonging to him 
certain goods which had not been entered with the revenue 
officials. Kieft, in pursuance of his usual arbitrary course of 



108 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

conduct, and, as was claimed, without any form of trial, and 
in disregard of the rights of Teunissen's widow, immediately 
ordered his property to be confiscated and sold ; and it is 
supposed that it was under these proceedings that the house 
on the shore of the East River was purchased by Jochera 
Pietersen Kuyter, who took up his residence there, after his 
farmhouse near the Harlem River had been destroyed by the 
Indians in 1644. 

Jochem Pietersen Kuyter was a native of the District of 
Ditmarssen, that portion of the Duchy of Holstein which lies 
on the German Ocean, between the mouths of the Elbe and 
the Eyder rivers, the broad flat meadows of which district, 
well stocked with the black and white cattle of the country, 
the passenger, coming down the Elbe from Hamburg, may 
see stretching away to his right. 

There was much in the situation and prospects of Kuyter 
that was similar to those of Cornells Melyn. Like the latter, 
he was a man of education and of some means, who had come 
over in the year 1639, well furnished with cattle, implements, 
and labor for commencing a plantation on a fairly large scale. 
As an energetic colonizer, in the prime of his activity, — he 
was born about 1597, — he was much courted and favored by 
the West India Company, which desired to attract such men 
to its colony. With him came his friend Jonas Bronck, from 
whose bouwery north of the Harlem, the Bronx River, which 
flowed near it, received its name, and thence the important 
division of New York City known as the Borough of the 
Bronx. With his farmers and herdsmen, Kuyter settled on 
the opposite side of the Harlem River from his friend Jonas 
Bronck, upon a tract of nearly four hundred acres of fine 
farming land, of which he had obtained a grant from the 
West India Company. This tract stretched along the Harlem 
River from about the present One Hundred and Twenty- 
seventh to One Hundred and Fortieth streets, and was com- 
monly known, long after his memory had faded away among 
men, as " Jochem Pieter's Flats ; " Kuyter liimself called it 
" Zegendaal," or " Vale of Blessing." Although much of his 



STUYVESANT'S ARRIVAL 109 

time away from the settlement and at the other end of Man- 
hattan Island, he interested himself in the progress of the 
village, and in 1642 was one of the " kerkmeesters " chosen 
to oversee the erection of the new church in the fort ; not, 
says Riker in his " History of Harlem," without an eye to the 
services of his workmen, " who were skilled and w^ould pre- 
pare the timber." By this time his plantation was well 
established and was yielding good returns of tobacco. Con- 
scious of its exposed position, he, hke most of the Board of 
Twelve Men (of which he was a member), was averse to using 
violent measures with the Indians, and he foretold to Kieft 
the quick retribution wliich would ensue for their massacre. 
His own bouwery house, being well palisaded about, escaped 
the first devastations of the Indians, but on the 5th of March, 
1644, he being then absent from the farm, the buildings, though 
guarded, were set on fire in the night and destroyed by the 
savages. 

Like Melyn, Kuyter was now forced to seek an abode for 
himself in the village of New Amsterdam, and in this way 
apparently he came to purchase the small house at the corner 
of Broad and Pearl streets, already spoken of. Henceforth, 
he and Cornehs Melyn were closely associated in their rela- 
tions towards Kieft and towards his successor, Director- 
General Stuyvesant. 

This latter person, who had taken the place of Kieft by 
appointment from the West India Company in 1646, had 
been long looked for, and in May, 1647, he arrived at New 
Amsterdam. Most of the inhabitants of the town were as- 
sembled on Schreyers Hoek and at the little dock when the 
new Director- General landed ; and they accompanied him to 
the fort, where Kieft was ready to surrender the government. 
In doing so, he, with great assurance, thanked the citizens for 
the attaclunent and fidelity they had always shown to him, 
and requested their formal indorsement of his administration. 
On all sides a loud shout of dissent went up from the crowd, 
half of whom, probably, had been ruined as the result of his 
atrocious Indian pohcy; and Melyn and Kuyter declared 



110 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

roundly that they had nothing to thank liini for, and no 
approval to give. 

This scene seems to have made a deep impression upon one 
person at least, and that one was the new Director-General. 
It was not that he approved of Kieft's conduct toward the 
Indians ; on the contrary, he believed in giving the latter just 
and conciliatory treatment, not so much, in all probability, on 
account of the absolute right of the matter, but by reason of 
tha power possessed by the natives of doing harm to the col- 
ony. Like most despotical-minded men placed in positions 
of considerable power, however, Stuyvesant entertained a 
profound jealousy of those who would be likely to criticise 
his acts or to attempt to thwart his will, and such men he 
saw at once in Cornells Melyn and in Jochem Pietersen 
Kuyter, and he undoubtedly entered upon his administration 
with a hearty hatred of them. 

His hatred was not long in showing itself. Within a few 
days after Kieft had delivered up his office, Melyn and Kuyter, 
as representatives of the old board known as " the Eight 
I\Ien," brought a formal complaint against Kieft, and asked 
for an inquiry into the abuses of his late government, and 
respecting his treatment of the Indians. They received a 
prompt answer from Stuyvesant that he considered the de- 
nials of the late Director-General as of more weight than any 
evidence his antagonists could bring to support their charges ; 
he would recognize them in no political capacity, but consid- 
ered them merely as " perturbators of the public peace." The 
Director-General and Council accordingly dechned to entertain 
their complaint. 

Melyn and Kuyter had in fact ventured upon very danger- 
ous ground. Unwittingly they had come before a magistrate 
as thoroughly prejudiced as any judge that ever sat upon a 
bench of justice, ministering to his own interests and passions 
while making pretences of doing equity. At the time of 
their private communication to the West India Company, 
respecting Kieft, in October, 1644, Peter Stuyvesant had been 
admitted as one of the Directors of that Company. No direct 



TRIAL OF MELYN AND KUYTER 111 

action appears to have been taken in the matter by the "West 
India Company, but when Stuyvesant came from the Nether- 
lands in the spring of 1647, he brought to Kieft a copy of the 
letter of "the Eight Men," which seems to have been the 
first information Kieft had received of that communication. 
Tliorouglily enraged, and very sure of his judge, Kieft, on 
June 19, 1647, brought criminal cliarges against Melyn and 
Kuyter for libel and for inducing the rest of " the Eight Men " 
to join in a false statement to the West India Company. 
Small grace was allowed to the accused men by Stuyvesant. 
They were ordered to file their answer to tlie cliarges within 
twenty-four hours. A small extension of time must have 
been granted to them, however, for their answer bears date 
June 22, 1647. In this document they boldly reiterate the 
charges, and offer to bring forward the four survivors of the 
" Board of Eight Men," to testify that as a matter of fact 
they had signed the charges against Kieft of their own will, 
and not through any influence of the persons accused. In 
reply to Kieft's demand that they should be sent to the Neth- 
erlands "as pests and seditious persons," tliey aver their wil- 
lingness to go there " as good patriots and proprietors in New 
Netherland." Stuyvesant's previous conduct had taught them 
what they had to expect from him, and they made no attempt 
to conciliate him ; on the contrary, tlieir answer contains a 
most cutting as well as just allusion to " the meanness and 
cowardice of those in authority who insult those who dare 
not answer them." They had undoubtedly determined, in 
anticipation of Stuyvesant's decision, to carry their cause 
before the States-General of the Netherlands. 

The decision of Stuyvesant and his Council was not long 
delayed. On the 25th of July, 1647, Jochem Pietersen Kuy- 
ter, one of whose atrocious acts consisted in "raising his 
finger in a threatening manner " to Kieft, was sentenced to 
three years' banishment and a fine of 150 guilders ; while 
Melyn was found guilty of an assortment of crimes, embrac- 
ing treason, bearing false witness, and libel and defamation ; 
he was sentenced to seven years' banishment and a fine of 



112 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

300 guilders ; Stuyvesant was exceedingly loath to let Melyn 
escape out of his clutches, and pleaded hard in the Council 
for a sentence of death upon him, citing in support of his 
views many pedantic quotations from the Hebrew and Roman 
Law ; but the Council, though disposed to be sufficiently ob- 
sequious, could not be brought to vote for the death penalty. 
Stuyvesant, in fact, seems to have had some forebodings of 
future trouble from Melyn and Kuyter, but as they could not 
be legally put to death, and as it would have been a constant 
source of danger to have kept them in confinement in New 
Amsterdam, where they were both very popular, he had to 
let them go, contenting himself with malignantly observing 
to Melyn, " If I were persuaded you would appeal from my 
sentences, or divulge tliem, I would have your head cut off, 
or have you hanged on the highest tree in New Netherland." 

Did these things bring to the mind of Cornelis Melyn the 
statue of Alva at Antwerp with his foot upon the necks of 
the Estates of Flanders ? It was an old story ! This petty 
despot in the fort at New Amsterdam only showed the same 
traits, upon his small stage, as the tyrants whom the men of 
the Low Countries had fought for generations upon a larger 
field. Stuyvesant's notions of authority were only those of 
the Count of Flanders : 

" The Lion stirred and awoke with a snort, 
And he swelled with rage till his breath came short : 
' Ere the brown leaf meet with the fiake of snow 
On the roundabout stair, to Ghent I '11 go. 

" ' For a little bird sang, and I dreamed as well, 
That the men of Ghent were as false as hell ; 
Coming by stealth when naught I feared, 
They trod on my toes and pulled my beard.' 

" Ere a snowflake fell, the Lion he went. 
And he roared a roar at the Gates of Ghent ; 
The gates they shook, though they were fast barred, 
And the warders heard it at Oudenarde. 

" At the very first roar, ten thousand men 
Fell sick to death ; he roared again, 
And the blood of twenty thousand flowed 
By the bridge of Roone, as broad as the road. 



MELYN AND KUYTER SAIL 113 

"Wo worth thee, Ghent! if having heard 
The first and second, thou bidest the third. 
Flat stones and awry, grass, potsherd, and shard, — 
Thy place shall be like an old chmxhyard." 

Only about three weeks remained for Melyn and Kuyter 
to settle their affairs, to make ready such documents as they 
could with safety, to lay before the States-General upon the 
appeal which they had determined to make, and to prepare 
for their long absence, if unsuccessful in their endeavors. 
The ship " Princess," upon which they must depart, lay in the 
harbor taking in her cargo, and was announced to sail about 
the middle of August. The intervening time doubtless wit- 
nessed many long and earnest consultations at the two small 
houses between "the ditch" and the river shore. On the 
11th of July of this year, 1647, Melyn had made a deed 
(probably in anticipation of the storm which was brewing) of 
his house in the present Broad Street to his eldest daughter, 
Cornelia, who on April 30 of the same year had married Cap- 
tain Jacob Loper, a Swede of Stockholm by birth, but who 
for some time had held a naval appointment in the Dutch 
service. 

Finally, on the 17th of August, 1647, Melyn and Kuyter, 
together with Kieft, Dominie Bogardus, and several other 
prominent characters of New Amsterdam, sailed from that 
town as previously mentioned,^ on the fatal voyage of the 
" Princess," Melyn being accompanied by a young son. The 
voyage could not have been marked by much cordiality be- 
tween the ex-Director-General and the men whom he had 
harassed by his prosecutions ; but when the " Princess " 
struck upon the rocks near Swansea, the near approach of 
death seems to have had an illuminating effect upon the 
mind of Kieft : " Friends," he said, with a sigh, to Kuyter 
and Melyn, " I have been unjust towards you ; can you for- 
give me ? " 

Cornells Melyn was one of the few who escaped death in 
the shipwreck, but his son was drowned. As for Kuyter, he 

1 See ante, page 27. 



114 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

told how he had lashed himself to a portion of the after deck 
of the vessel, and how when the fii'st dim light broke after 
that night of horror, he had discovered himself to be alone 
upon the floating fragment, except for what he took to be 
another person likewise lashed fast. Speaking, and receiving 
no answer, he concluded that the man was dead ; it turned 
out to be a cannon, which with the wreck and Kuyter was 
thrown by the violent surf upon the beach, where, breaking 
from its lashings it was found, — to their utmost amazement, 
— by the miners of Glamorgan and Caermarthen shires, who 
crowded to the spot as soon as it was day, and who afterwards 
set up the cannon as a memorial of the wonderful event. 

Melyn and Kuyter afterwards caused the sea in the vicinity 
of the wreck to be dragged for their chests, and in this way 
they were fortunate enough to recover a portion of their 
valuable papers. Reaching the Netherlands from England 
towards the close of the year 1647, tliey immediately pro- 
ceeded to lay their case before the States-General, at the 
Hague. They found that body favorably disposed towards 
them;^ their misfortunes had attracted public attention to 
them to a much greater degree than they were likely other- 
wise to have received; furthermore, the government of tlie 
Netherlands was by no means averse from exercising a re- 
vision over the affairs of the West India Company ; and 
the whole prosecution of the criminal proceedings had been 
disposed of with such manifest injustice toward the con- 
demned persons that the States-General acted with little 
delay, and on the 28th of April, 1648, it issued an order, in 
the form of a mandamus, permitting an appeal to be had by 
Melyn and Kuyter from the criminal judgments pronounced 
against them by Director Stuyvesant and his Council, order- 
ing a suspension of all proceedings under said judgments, 

1 Much more so than were the Directors of the West India Company, who 
on April 7, 1648, wrote to Stuyvesant : " Cornel is Melyn is well known to us, and 
we shall understand how to refute his complaint. It is to he regretted that 
people have become so intimate with such fellows, when they ought to have 
given a good example to others," — referring doubtless to his supporters in the 
States-General. 



MANDAMUS TO STUYVESANT 115 

and summoning Stuyvesant to appear before them to justify 
his acts. Under the procedure of the Dutch law, such 
orders were required to be served by a messenger of the 
States-General, or by a marshal or notary ; but to avoid the 
inconvenience of this in the present case, a special order 
was made allowing the service on Stuyvesant to be made by 
any person whom Melyn and Kuyter might appoint. It was 
arranged that Melyn should return to New Amsterdam with 
the order of the States-General, while Kuyter should remain, 
to be prepared for any treachery or exertion of arbitrary 
power on the part of Director-General Stuyvesant. In order 
to further guard against such danger, Melyn also procured a 
letter of safety for himself, directed to Stuyvesant, from the 
Stadtholder of the United Provinces personally, — Wilham 
II., Prince of Orange, father of the great politician best 
known to us as William III., King of England. 

Armed with these documents, Melyn sailed in the winter 
of 1648-49, apparently landing at Boston, and thence travel- 
ling through New England to New Amsterdam. He was 
naturally exultant at his victory over the Director-General, 
and seems to have shown some lack of discretion, exhibiting 
his papers from the Netherlands in several places, and talking 
in rather a high strain. At New Haven he met one of his 
townsmen, Eghbert van Borsum, who afterwards made a de- 
position that Melyn had said " that the High and Mighty 
Lords, the States of the United Netherlands, were greatly 
surprised that the English had not forcibly dragged Director 
Stuyvesant out of the Fort, and hung him on the highest 
tree; also that he had brought Kieft to his grave and 
that he would bring Stuyvesant also there : " there was other 
talk, according to the informant, but he went away, " so that 
he might no longer listen to the prattle." 

Upon his arrival at New Amsterdam in March, 1649, 
Melyn took care to revenge himself upon the Director- 
General for the insults he had previously received from him 
by having as many of the citizens of New Amsterdam as he 
could get together present to witness the mortification of that 



116 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

official when the order of the States-General was served upon 
him : he even attempted to lengthen out the torture of his 
arbitrary and crestfallen opponent by reading aloud to him 
the contents of the document, but this Stuyvesant prevented 
by angrily snatcliing the paper from him, — no doubt to the 
great delight of the crowd ; he, however, sullenly announced 
his intention of respecting the orders of the Prince of Orange 
and of the States-General. 

In the mean time, encouraged by the results of the applica- 
tion of Melyn and Kuyter to the States-General, the jurist 
Adriaen van der Donck, in conjunction with several other 
opponents of the administration at New Amsterdam, pre- 
pared in July, 1619, the historic document known as " The 
Remonstrance of New Netherland." This vigorous paper, 
attacking the whole policy of the West India Company in 
relation to its colony of New Netherland, was carried over to 
the Fatherland by a deputation including Van der Donck 
and Melyn. Their departure was hastened by the fact that 
the Director-General had quietly sent over the Secretary Van 
Tienhoven to represent him before the States-General. The 
Secretar}^ probably carried with him a letter from Stuyvesant 
to that body, bearing date Aug. 10, 1649, ostensibly for the pur- 
pose of acknowledging the receipt of their mandamus, but in 
reality filled with insinuations against Cornells Melyn. Two 
weeks after the departure of Van Tienhoven the deputation 
sailed, — probably by the next vessel, — and for the second 
time Melyn watched the house of his family near the East 
River shore fade away in the distance ; he left them behind 
him, to be subjected to various petty annoyances from the 
Director-General. In the summer of the year 1649, Melyn's 
son-in-law. Captain Loper, applied for permission to trade in 
the South or Delaware River, but although the Council wtis 
in favor of granting the application, Stuyvesant sullenly re- 
fused to do so, giving no other reason than that he had re- 
ceived express orders from his superiors " to keep an eye on 
Cornehs Melyn." "We wish," says Janneken, the wife 
of Cornells Melyn, in a letter to her husband, dated December 



DELAYS IN THE NETHERLANDS 117 

17, 1649, " that God would be pleased to send the delegates 
back quickly, with business accomplished, for here matters 
continue so bad as to excite murmurs against Heaven." 

Matters, however, did not move quickly; the management 
and even the future existence of the West India Company 
itself were now in question before the States- General, and 
although that corporation had much declined from its former 
power, it had still sufficient resources to make a vigorous 
fight in its own behalf and in that of its officers. To the 
charges made by Van der Donck, Melyn, and others, it sent 
to the ^States-General on the 27th of January, 1650, an 
answer couched in bitter terms against the petitioners.* 
Following the practice adopted by the States-General, all 
matters relating in any way to the West India Company 
were referred, in the first instance, to a standing committee 
upon the affairs of that body, there sometimes to slumber 
a long while. Melyn seems to have become wearied of the 
delays, and on the 8th of February, 1650, he complains to 
the States-General that owing to the absence from New 
Amsterdam of the Secretary, and to the obstacles thrown in 
his way by the authorities at that place, he has been unable 
to obtain certain papers necessary for his suit ; and he prays 
that august body to take into consideration the fact that he 
" hath now groped such a length of time, since the year 1643, 
in this labyrinth, without any error or fault of his, for the 
advancement of the public interests." 

The records which are accessible fail to show the final re- 
sult of the appeal of Melyn and Kuyter to the States- General 
from Stuyvesant's arbitrary judgments, but whether these were 
finally overturned or not, no further molestation to those per- 
sons appears to have ever taken place by reason of them, and 
both Kuyter and Melyn were now anxious to return to New 
Netherland and to take advantage of the quiet now prevailing 
with the Indians, to restore their wasted plantations. 

1 The malignant disposition of the officers of tlie West India Company towards 
Melyn, Knyter, and Van der Donck, — especially towards Melyn, — are shown in 
almost every letter sent by them to New Netherland about this time. 



118 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

In his long sojourn at the Hague, Cornells Melyn had been 
frequently brought into contact with a person of some note 
in the government at that period. It has been already stated 
that the papers relating to the affairs of the West India Com- 
pany which were presented to the States-General were re- 
ferred in the first instance to a standing committee of that 
body. At the head of this committee was Henryk van der 
Capellen : this gentleman was a deputy to the States-General 
from the county of Zutphen, and was a member of the Dutch 
nobility, being Lord of Esselt and Hasselt, near the east shore 
of the Zuyder Zee. He is frequently spoken of in the docu- 
ments relating to New Netherland by his title of Baron van der 
Capellen tho Ryssel, and was a man of independent fortune.^ 
The Baron van der Capellen appears to have taken a lively 
interest in the affairs of Cornelis Melyn, and not only did he 
forward the interests of the latter in the reports of his com- 
mittee to the States-General, but he finally entered into an 
agreement with him for the improvement and development of 
his Staten Island manor, or rather patroonship, in which 
Van der Capellen purchased an interest. 

The associates now made active preparations for carrying 
on the work of improvement. Van der Capellen purchased, 
in the summer of 1650, a sliip called Nieuw Nederlandsche 
Fortuyn, — The Fortune of New Netherland, — which he 
designed to send over to his colony ; the vessel sailed for New 
Amsterdam in the fall or winter of that year, carrying a 
superintendent, carpenter, seven farmers, and a company of 

1 In an interesting communication respecting the ancient Van der Capellen 
family, Mr. Arnold J. F. van Laer, of the manuscript department in the State 
Library at Albany and formerly of Utrecht in the Netherlands, observes : " This 
is one of our prominent historic families, having played an important part in 
the eighty years' war with Spain. They were originally from France, where they 
received, as early as the eleventh and twelfth centuries, favors from the court ; and 
the house, in which the title of baron has been used for centuries, is to this day 
closely allied with the oldest families in the country." Henryk van der Capellen, 
referred to in the text, is understood to have died in 1659, leaving no descendants; 
it is uncertain whether his Staten Island estate was surrendered to the West 
India Company, or whether it was confiscated by the English, in the hands of 
his collateral heirs in 1 664, as being the property of subjects of the Netherlands. 



STUYVESANT CONFISCATES "FORTUNE" 119 

seventy persons in all, with their necessary equipment, for 
the colony. With them returned Cornells Melyn, who on the 
preceding July 1 had received from tlie States-General let- 
ters of protection against his inveterate enemy Stuyvesant.^ 

The ship " Fortune," forced by stress of weather, touched at 
the Rhode Island Colony, and thence pursued her voyage to 
New Amsterdam ; by this deviation from her course, she had, 
it was claimed, infringed upon some of the customs regula- 
tions; and the Director-General grasped with avidity the 
opportunity of revenging himself upon Cornells Melyn, whom 

1 It may not be out of place here to give some account of the further progress 
of the proceedings before the States-General against Director- General Stuyvesant 
and the West India Company, in the investigation souglit for by Adriaen van der 
Donck and his associates in the " Remonstrance " of 1649. On the 9th of August, 
1650, the committee of the States-General reported that the matters alleged 
ought to be inquired into, and that Cornelis van Tienhoven, Stuyvesaut's secre- 
tary and representative, then in the Netherlands, should be examined upon inter- 
rogatories. That wily individual, after having upon the 29th of November, 
1650, delivered a scurrilous reply to the "Remonstrance," managed to evade 
an examination till the latter part of the winter of 1650-51, when it was found 
that he was preparing to return to New Amsterdam. Thereupon the States- 
General, on February 7, 1651, made an order that he should not leave the country 
till he had answered certain prepared interrogatories; and on March 14 a 
further order was served upon him and Jan Jansen Damen, his father-in-law, 
who had accompanied him from New Amsterdam as Stuyvesaut's private agent, 
to appear for examination before the legislative body. The parties concerned, 
well assured of the backing of the West India Company, coolly set at defiance 
the mandate of the States-General. Jan Damen, bearing with him a deed from 
the West India Company to himself, as agent for Petrus Stuyvesant, of "the 
company's great bouwery" (weU known for nearly two hundred years as the 
Stuyvesant Farm, on Manhattan Island), which deed bore date March 12, 1651, 
immediately sailed for New Amsterdam, as the secretary of the company calmly 
notified the States-General, on the 21st of that month. Much irritated, the 
States-General now ordered the Amsterdam Chamber of the West India Com- 
pany not to allow Van Tienhoven to leave Amsterdam, and to notify the skipper 
of their ship " Waterhont," by which he was preparing to depart, not to receive 
him till he had obtained their permit. This order was treated with the same 
contempt as the former one, and on May 5, Van Tienhoven set sail for New 
Amsterdam. The matter appears to have now been allowed to drop. That 
such disregard of the authority of the States-General was suffered, appears to 
have been partly "^owing to the dislike of the States-General to interfere in 
provincial matters, partly owing to the ill-defined limits of its authority, and 
partly owing to the inexpediency of exciting hostile feelings or dissensions in the 
then threatening state of affairs between the United Provinces and England. 



120 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

he affected to consider as a concealed partner in the enter- 
prise. He proceeded in the most arbitrary manner ; the crew 
of the " Fortune " were arrested and thrown into prison, and 
the vessel was condemned and sold. Stuyvesant had, however, 
in this matter, attacked a person who was too influential to be 
assailed thus with impunity. The Baron van der Capellen 
immediately instituted proceedings before the States-General 
against the West India Company for the illegal seizure of his 
vessel ; he was awarded heavy damages, and the Company 
had to pay roundly for the privilege of maintaining their 
despotic servant in his ofl&ce at New Amsterdam. 

As for Melyn himself, we do not find that he actually came 
in person at this time into the clutches of Stuyvesant, and 
there is reason to believe that instead of coming up to the 
town on the incoming vessel, he landed at his " manor " upon 
Staten Island. The men of Melyn's colony, and those of his 
partner, Van der Capellen, must have made quite a consider- 
able force, and Stuyvesant does not appear to have considered 
it advisable to make any hostile incursion against him.^ His 
property in New Amsterdam, however, embracing what re- 
mained of his purchases of 1644, and extending along the 
river shore from near the present Broad Street to the City 
Tavern, at the head of the present Coenties Slip, was confis- 
cated by Stuyvesant's orders. A portion of it, adjoining the 
tavern, was added to the ground of that establishment, and 
the remainder was divided into four parcels extending from 
"the road," or the present Stone Street, to the river shore, 
and these were granted to various persons in September, 1651. 

Cornelis Melyn now continued to reside for several years 
upon his Staten Island estate, not venturing, according to 
statements made by some of his contemporaries, to set his foot 
in New Amsterdam. His neighbor and friend, Jochem Pieter- 
sen Kuyter, had made his peace with Stuyvesant, whom with 
two others he had admitted in 1651 into joint ownership with 

^ Melyn is also stated to have kept, at this time, a large number of Indians 
— more than a hundred in fact — in his service. As these statements come from 
his enemies, however, they must be accepted with caution. 



IMPKISONMENT OF MELYN 121 

himself in liis plantation on the Harlem flats, where he was 
now actively engaged in restoring his impaired fortunes ; but 
in 1654 he was murdered by the Indians at Harlem. Kuy- 
ter's widow soon married Willem Jansen, the farmer or super- 
intendent of the Harlem plantation, but during the Indian 
outbreak in the fall of 1655 she too was killed by the natives, 
Kuyter left no children, and his small house at the corner of 
Broad and Pearl streets stood for several years vacant and 
ownerless, a melancholy memorial of the Indian troubles. 
Finally, the crumbling away of the river-bank in front of it 
led to action by the magistrates, and a " curator " was ap- 
pointed, who, on January 12, 1658, sold the house at pubhc 
auction to Hendrick Jansen Vandervin. 

As for Cornells Melyn, we find that in the summer of 
1655 he was a prisoner in New Amsterdam ; but of the cir- 
cumstances leading to this imprisonment, we have no informa- 
tion. On the 31st of August of that year, upon a petition of 
Melyn's wife, asking that her husband might be removed to a 
more convenient place, " on account of his sore leg," the 
Council made an order that she might be permitted to remove 
liim to a more convenient place, " in the City Hall, or else- 
where," on condition that he should furnish bail. At this 
very time, Director-General Stuyvesant was busy in fitting 
out the force with which, on the 5th of September of this 
year, he started against the Swedes on the Delaware ; and it 
is difficult to avoid the suspicion that he had availed himself 
of liis mihtary preparations for the purpose of getting his old 
adversary into his power. 

However this may be, Melyn must have soon returned to 
his colony upon Staten Island, for there, in the course of the 
Indian hostilities which followed the outbreak of September 15, 
1655, at New Amsterdam, he and several members of his 
family were made captives by the Indians, and his plantation 
was again destroyed. This misfortune was the ruin of 
Melyn's prospects upon Staten Island, which was left by the 
natives, according to the report of Secretary Van Tienhoven, 
"without an inhabitant or a house." The Indians, upon 



122 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

this occasion, seem, as a rule, to have treated their prisoners 
without much harshness, and soon delivered them up for a 
moderate ransom. 

No further particulars respecting the prosecution of Cor- 
nelis Melyn by the New Amsterdam authorities have come 
to our notice, but it is evident that he soon abandoned the 
colony. In the early part of 1657, he and his son Jacob, hav- 
ing repaired to New Haven, there took the oath of allegiance 
to the English government. He subsequently went again to 
the Netherlands, and there, in June, 1659, for the sum of 
1500 guilders, he surrendered his patroonship of Staten Island 
to the West India Company. After the fall of Stuyvesant 
and the capitulation to the English in 1664, Jacob Melyn 
returned to New York, and resided there for a number of 
years. His father, Cornells Melyn, was still residing in New 
Haven in 1662, but the time of his death is uncertain. 

The remaining members of Cornells Melyn's family seem 
to have still resided at the house in the easterly half of the 
present Broad Street, which, in 1647, he had given to his 
daughter Cornelia: her first husband. Captain Jacob Loper, 
had died prior to 1653, and she married in that year Jacob 
Schellinger, a merchant of Amsterdam, who was carrying on 
business in New Netherland, and who, after the retirement of 
Cornells Melyn, became the mainstay of the family. Jan- 
netje, the wife of Melyn, and liis daughter Corneha and her 
husband were for several years engaged in frequent litiga- 
tions with Captain Adriaen Pos, the agent of Melyn's co- 
partner, the Baron van der Capellen, respecting the division 
of the Staten Island property, and the settlement of various 
conflicting claims in connection therewith ; but it does not 
appear that Cornells Melyn, for the space of nearly five years, 
again set foot in New Amsterdam, to encounter his old enemy, 
Director-General Stuyvesant, — " a tyrant, as we have now 
and then been accused by the ignorant," as he complacently 
remarks of himself. Melyn was certainly in New Amster- 
dam in 1661, however, no doubt protected by his English 
citizenship. 



THE MELYN HOUSE REMOVED 123 

The Melyn house in Broad Street did not remain long in 
existence after its builder had quitted it. After the Indian 
troubles of 1655 had in some measure subsided, it was de- 
cided to open up and to regulate several streets, in order to 
afford accommodation to the increasing number of those who 
desired to build in the town. One of the changes proposed 
in the early part of 1656 was to widen and deepen " The 
Ditch," so as to form a canal navigable for small boats, with 
a sufficient roadway on each side of it ; this, when completed 
by sheathing the sides of the canal with planks, formed the 
well-known Heere Graft, which covered the site of the pres- 
ent Broad Street, and which was a reminder, in a humble 
way, of the Heere Graft in Amsterdam. ^ 

To carry out this work, it became necessary to remove the 
house of the Melyn family, and in June, 1656, Jacob Schel- 
linger, Melyn's son-in-law, was notified not to proceed with 
the rest of his immediate neighbors in the construction of 
sheet-piling along their respective water-fronts, " as his house 
lies in the canal and on the road." A year or two afterwards 
it was demolished, and there was given by the burgomasters 
to the Melyn family, in partial compensation, a small lot of 
ground, only about eighteen feet square, at the southeast 
corner of Hoogh Straet (present Stone Street) and the Graft; 
this lot had been gained by the straightening of Hoogh Straet 
which took place about this time, the western end of that 
street being shifted some twenty or twenty-five feet north- 
wards, in order to make it connect more nearly with Brouwer 

1 The Heere Graft (or modern Gracht) of Amsterdam, of which a view is given 
in this woric, is a canal, which with its bordering passageways is about one hun- 
dred and fifty English feet in breadth. Beginning and ending at or very near 
the Port, sometimes called, not very correctly, the River Y, it extends in a semi- 
elliptical curve around a considerable section of the city. A large portion of 
the Graft was constructed from about 1610 to 1615, and in the middle of the 
seventeenth century it formed the boundary of the city to the eastward, though 
a large extent of buildings had grown up to the west of it. The Heere Graft 
soon became one of the principal thoroughfares of Amsterdam, and (though 
containing no public buildings of much note), it soon came to be a favorite 
residence of the principal merchants, bankers, and others of the wealthier portion 
of the community. 



124 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

Straet (or tlie present Stone Street, west of Broad) ; an 
inspection of tlie locality will show that the lines of these 
streets are not continuous at the present time. Here the 
Melyns built their second dwelling, a small brick house, and 
here some of them resided for many years. Nominally, the 
property belonged to the infant children of Captain Jacob 
Loper and of Cornelia Melyn,^ but it soon passed into the 
hands of other members of the family. 

On May 27, 1684, after Jannetje, the widow of Cornelis 
Melyn, had closed her eventful and troubled life, her eldest 
son Jacob received a conveyance of this property through the 
administrators of his mother's estate. He did not remain per- 
manently in New York, but was engaged in the business of a 
leather-dresser in Boston ; and in May, 1697, he sold the house 
for ^6360 to William Bickley, a merchant of the city, who had 
previously resided in it for some time as a tenant. It is a 
curious fact that this small plot of ground has retained its 
dimensions through the vicissitudes of nearly two centuries 
and a half, and is to-day occupied by a small and somewhat 
dingy brick building with a wealth of rusty iron fire-escapes ; 
it appears to have stoutly resisted absorption by the more 
imposing structui-e whose blank walls of j-ellow brick over- 
tower it on two sides. 

Just south of this house, along the present Broad Street, 
was a small space of ground which belonged to the Melyn 
family, and which became available for building purposes 
when the Heere Graft was opened and regulated, in 1657 
or thereabouts. Here, at a date unknown, but doubtless 
within three or four years after the period last mentioned, 
a cottage was built which was afterwards occupied for many 
years by Isaac Melyn, a younger son of Cornelis. Isaac 
Melyn appears to have been engaged in shipping ventures 
as early as 1672 : he was at that time owner or master of 

1 The record of baptisms iu the Dutch Church contains the names of two of 
the children of Captain Loper; namely, Jacobus, October 25, 1648, and Janne- 
ken, October 30, 1650. The daughter Janneken married, October 9, 1674, Joris 
Davidson of Albany : as to the son, see Appeudix II. to this volume. 




ViKw OF THE Southeast Corxeu of Broad and Stone Streets. 

Showing the sites of the later " Melyn House " and that of 

tlie poet Jacob Steendani. 



SIBOUT CLAESSEN 125 

the ship " Expectation," and having a controversy with some 
freighters respecting damage occasioned by a leak, he received 
the permission of the Governor and Council to have the 
cargo unloaded and examined by arbitrators. The Broad 
Street premises were sold in 1722 by Joanna, the wife of 
Jonathan Dickinson of Elizabethtown, New Jersey, who was 
the only surviving child of Isaac Melyn, to William Ver- 
planck, a merchant of New York.^ 

At the time of our survey of New Amsterdam in 1655, a 
dwelling-house had been recently built on the south side of 
Hoogh Straet, immediately east of the spot upon which the 
later, or second, Melyn house was, within a year or two 
afterwards erected ; its site is at present covered by the 
northerly end of the large building which encloses two sides 
of the small Melyn plot, above described.^ The lot upon 
which this dwelling-house stood had been sold by Cornells 
Melyn, soon after his return from the Netherlands, in the 
early part of 1651, to Sibout Claessen, a carpenter by trade, 
from the ancient town of Hoorn, then a famous seaport 
upon the Zuyder Zee, some sixteen or eighteen miles north 
of Amsterdam. As Director Stuyvesant had, at this time, 
caused proceedings to be instituted against Melyn for an 
alleged infringement of the revenue laws, under which pro- 
ceedings the balance of his land along the East River shore 
was afterwards confiscated as above stated,^ he apparently 
refused to recognize the validity of Melyn's transfer to 
Claessen, and would not allow any deed of the property to 
be registered. Claessen, however, not only maintained pos- 
session of the premises, but thriftily endeavored to take ad- 
vantage of the irregularity, by refusing to pay IMelyn the 
price agreed upon. Stuyvesant's persecutions seem to have 
deterred Melyn for some years from prosecuting his demand 
for the purchase-money, and when he finally sued Claessen 

^ For further details respecting tlie family of Cornelis Melj'n, see Appendix 
II. to this volume. 

^ See ante, page 124. ^ gge a7ite, page 120. 



126 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

before the Court of the Burgomasters, the cause languished 
along for several years, and was not terminated in Melyn's 
favor until 1661. 

The rear of this lot of Sibout Claessen, which extended to 
the shore, was encroached upon by the tides in violent storms ; 
and, for the purpose of preventing it from being washed away, 
Claessen, first among the owners upon the shore, constructed 
a sheet-piling of planks along the bank in the rear of his 
premises. This he had done prior to 1654, and upon his 
complaint the other owners, as far east as the present Coenties 
Alley, were ordered to carry out a similar work along their 
respective lots, the burgomasters engaging to construct the 
same protection to the shore in front of the Town House.^ 

1 Sibout Claessen occupied the property on Hoogh Straet (Stone), above de- 
scribed, for many years. He had no children, but had married the widow of 
Aert Teunissen, a farmer at Hoboken who was killed by the Indians while on a 
trading excursion in the vicinity of Sandy Hook, in the year 1643; to her two 
daughters Wyntje, the wife of Simon Barentsen, and Susanna, wife of Rynier 
Willemsen, girls of about seventeen and fourteen years at the time of our survey, 
Claessen left his estate, at his death in 1680. In 1646 Claessen received a grant 
of about one hundred acres of land, " at the Hook of the Hellegaat called Hoorn's 
Hoek." This was a headland on the East River shore, near the foot of the pres- 
ent Eightj^-ninth Street, and the name is supposed to have been given to it by 
Claessen in remembrance of the locality of similar appellation, east of the entrance 
to the harbor of his native city of Hoorn. Claessen soon parted with the land 
upon the East Kiver, but the name was long familiar ; indeed, it appears upon 
a map published as late as 1875 or thereabouts, in the corrupted form of 
" Harris' Hook." 



CHAPTER XII 

JACOB STEENDAM, THE DUTCH POET, AND HIS HOUSE.— 
HIS POETICAL WORKS. - " DEN DISTEL VINK." — POEMS ON 
NEW NETHERLAND. — HIS LATTER YEARS AT BAT AVI A 

Der Christlichen Religion 
War er von hertzen zugethon, 
Dieselb zn fiirderu und zu ehren, 
Und rechten Gottsdienst zu vermehren. 

Das ist der schatz in dieser Welt, 
Der ubertrifft alls Gut und Gelt, 
Welchen der Rost nit fressen mag, 
Er bleibt biss an den Jiingsten Tag. 

" Ritter Theurdanck." 

BETWEEN the lot of Sibout Claessen and the Town 
House, upon the south side of the High Street, lay the 
confiscated land of Cornelis Melyn. This (after deducting 
a portion, which was added to the grounds of the Town 
House), had been divided into four parcels, which were sold 
to as many different individuals in September, 1651. Of 
these parcels, the one next to Claessen's lot was held at the 
time of our survey by Mattheus, or Matthew de Vos, a 
respectable notary of the town, who has been previously 
mentioned in these sketches.^ In the year 1655 it appears 
to have been still vacant and unimproved, ^ but the next year 
it was sold to Adolph Pietersen, a house carpenter who 
seems to have built upon it and occupied it as a residence 
for many years. ^ Of the remaining parcels of this series the 

^ See ante, p. 12. 

- As, by the way, it happens to be at the present time (1900), the lot being 
boarded off from the street. 

* This person appears to liave been also occasionally employed — possibly 
for the convenience of the use of his carpenter's rule — in measuring off parcels 



128 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

two nearest to the Town Hall were held in 1655, one by 
Sybrant Jansen, sometimes called Galma, — it is uncertain 
whether this was as yet built upon; the other, adjoining the 
enclosure of the Town House, was owned by Captain Adriaen 
Blommaert, skipper of the West India Company's ship 
" New Amsterdam ; " it was probably built upon as early as 
1655, but the house seems to have stood upon what was 
really the rear of the lot, near the shore, so as to enjoy the 
immediate proximity of the Town House. 

As for the intervening parcel of land, or the one situated 
between the lot of Matthew de Vos upon the west and that 
of Sybrant Jansen upon the east, it possesses far more of 
interest and is in fact one of the historic sites of New 
Amsterdam. Here stood, without doubt, the original house 
of Burger Jorissen, the smith, erected certainly as early as 
1641, and one of the first dwelling-houses, if not the very 
first, to be built in the village of New Amsterdam, east of the 
present Broad Street. Sold to Cornells Melyn in 1644, as 
already stated, ^ it was granted in 1651 as a part of his con- 
fiscated estate to Cornells van Tienhoven, the favored Secre- 
tary under Director-General Stuyvesant; and upon the 12th 
of October, 1654, it was purchased from Van Tienhoven by 
Doctor Jacob Varrevanger for Jacob Steendam, the Dutch 
poet, who resided here at the time of our survey. 

The passer-by in Stone Street, between Broad Street and 
Hanover Square, will, if he have sufficient leisure to look 
about him, be quite sure to have his attention directed to a 
two story and basement brick dwelling-house standing oddly 
in the midst of the dull warehouses of that locality. For a 
New York building, the house is ancient, — that is to say, 
it was probably erected in the first or second decade of the 
nineteenth century. Time has dealt hardly with the edifice 

of land for individuals. In this connection he executed, in 1664, immediately 
after the surrender to the English, "a survey "of a small parcel of land for 
Burger Jorissen, and in tliis occurs perhaps the first use of the new name of the 
town which can he traced to private citizens. Pietersea's phonetic spelling of 
the name was " Nu larck." 
1 See ante, pp. 104, 105. 



STEENDAM'S HOUSE IN STONE STREET 129 

in some respects ; its brown-stone doorsteps and window-sills 
are crumbling away, and its iron railings are deeply bitten 
with rust. The lower portion of the building seems to be 
devoted to certain mechanical trades, but the second story 
still displays its fringed window-shades and linen-covered 
parlor furniture, as it may have done three quarters of a 
century ago.^ It is no very violent supposition that this old 
house. No. 26 Stone Street, may be the immediate successor 
of the original house of Burger Jorissen, as afterwards held 
by Cornells Melyn and the Secretary Van Tienhoven. Upon 
the Justus Danckers view of New Amsterdam, the period 
of which cannot vary much from the year 1650, this build- 
ing appears to be clearly shown, and its position being an 
isolated one, the representation is likely to approach accu- 
racy, at any rate in its essential details. The house thus 
depicted is a modest-looking structure of a story and a half 
in height; its gable end fronts the road, but it has a door- 
way towards the south, looking in the direction of the City 
Tavern and of the river, the intervening space being as yet 
unoccupied by any buildings. 

At the "stoep" before this doorway a slight play of the 
imagination will suffice to place us: the elevated railway 
and the warehouses on Pearl Street and thence to the river 
have all disappeared, and in their place the waves ripple 
upon a shingly beach; at our front the garden extends a 
hundred feet or more to the bank overlooking the shore ; and 
a well with its rude sweep is seen among the vegetable beds 
and the currant bushes; to the left of us the Hoogh Straet 
stretches for a space, till it is gradually lost as it curves 
around the large house and grounds of Govert Loocker- 
mans;^ between these and the old City Tavern, or Town 

1 After the completion of the present work, and in the latter part of 1901, or 
in the beginning of 1902, the old building spoken of in the text as occupying the 
site of Steendam's house Avas demolished. The vacant spot upon which it stood 
can be seen in the view of the site of the Melyn house at the corner of Broad 
and Stone streets, facing page 124 of this work, at the left-hand side of the 
print. 

2 Situated on the present Hanover Square. 

9 



130 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

Hall, which is backed by a swelling knoll and some forest 
trees near the shore, a vista opens far up the dark blue waters 
of the East River; across the river (in which, not far from 
the shore, a few New England coasters and one or two of the 
high-sterned sea ships of the West India Company are lying 
at anchor), 1 the last rays of a summer sun gild the forests on 
the hills of Long Island ; and at our side, in a halo of the 
smoke of his evening pipe, is the patient, thoughtful, firm, 
but somewhat careworn face of Jacob Steendam, long-time 
servant of the West India Company, the first poet of New 
Netherland, and — if we leave out of view Welde and 
Mather's crude metrical version of the Psalms, published 
in New England in 1640, and Mrs. Anne Bradstreet's 
abstractions, published there at about the same period — 
in all probability the earliest poet of North America. ^ 

Jacob Steendam's life had been one of hardship and of 
adventure. Like Catullus, he found his haven — 

" Multas per gentes, et multa per aquora vectits,^' 

and it was this wandering life that called forth the lines, — 

*• O Steendam ! die door zoo veel zeen, 
Een reex van vijftien ronde jaeren 
U aen de Maatschappij verbint," — 

Thou, Steendam, who o'er many a sea, 

In service of the Company, 

While fifteen years around have rolled, etc., 

addressed to him by his friend, the Dutch poet, Pieter 
Verhoek. 

1 In Burger Jorissen's day, in 1641, a drunken gunner, upon one of the 
vessels anchored near the shore, did considerable damage to this house, by the 
discharge of a shotted cannon in firing a salute. 

2 George Sandys, while treasurer of the Colony of Virginia in its early days, 
is said to have occupied a portion of his time in preparing his translation of Ovid. 
As his stay in the colony was but a limited one, however, and as his works con- 
tain nothing relating to America, it is difficult to see why he should be called an 
American poet. As for the Rev. William Morrell, who resided for a very short 
time in the Plymouth Colony soon after its foundation, his verses published 
after his return to England, about the year 1625, in the pedantic Latin of his 
day, and which he called " Nova Anglia," are to be looked upon more as a liter- 
ary curiosity than anything else. 





' i '""^ ' 3^- -^z*" '^"^ - '^'■^'^■Jf ^-^""'' 

uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuimuinMiuiuju(iiiuuuuuuuuiJUuauauuuuuuuuuuiiuiiini'jL'i'"i'iri;''''!'T'TPr'''.'n"'T"r"'vi'')i' 

l!|liltlllllKllfIM:IIIMtilM!iil'iiil '■■■ 




Jacob Stp:exdam — The Koomax roKTRAix. 
From a print in the Lenox Library, New York. 



ENKHUYSEN 131 

According to the best information accessible, Steendam 
was born about 1616 in the city of Enkhuysen. This old 
town, in the extreme northeastern part of the province of 
Holland, and at the entrance to the Zuyder Zee, though 
now much decayed, was in Jacob Steendam's time in high 
prosperity. Its streets of substantial stone houses were 
filled with a busy throng of ship-builders, pilots, seamen, the 
fishermen of several hundred herring smacks then owned in 
the city, and the numerous artisans and tradesmen supplying 
the wants of this maritime population. The little city, too, 
was proud of its historic and scientific renown; in 1572 it 
was the first town in North Holland to raise the standard of 
liberty against the oppression of Spain, and its citizens had 
fought valiantly in the Dutch fleets and armies; the ships 
built here found their way to all parts of the globe ; one of 
them, "The Maid of Enkhuysen," was in the New Amster- 
dam trade ; the spirit of geographical research and of explo- 
ration became active, and Enkhuysen boasted of several 
renowned geographers and naturalists. 

The city lay in the midst of a world of waters, extending, 
as far as the eye could reach, to the north, east, and south ; 
only northwards, across the wide mouth of the Zuyder Zee, 
the houses and steeples of the old Frisian city of Staveren 
appeared to rise out of the sea: — 

*' Am fernen Horizonte 
Erscheint, wie ein Nebelbild, 
Die Stadt, niit ihreu Tiirmen 
In Abeuddammrung gehiillt ; " 

and far to the east, the light upon the island of Urck shone 
dimly through the misty nights upon the Zuyder Zee. 

To a mind like that of the young Jacob Steendam, there 
must have come many romantic visions, as the Amsterdam 
ships passed daily by Enkhuysen on their way to and from 
many strange lands, while now and then Dutch men-of-war 
or privateers sailed by with their Spanish or Portuguese 
prizes. The love of adventure was strong within him, and 



132 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

at an early age he went to Amsterdam, where he soon 
entered the service of the West India Company. ^ But 
little is known respecting the position he occupied under 
that corporation, nor of his particular travels; when about 
twenty -five years of age, however, he was sent, in the inter- 
ests of the Company, to the coast of Guinea, and was present 
at the taking of Fort Axen or Axem from the Portuguese, 
in 1642,2 after which his duties detained him upon the Afri- 
can coast till the year 1649, when he appears to have returned 
to Amsterdam. 2 

At least as early as 1636, when not more than twenty 
years of age, Steendam had written verses, and about 
1649-50 he published a collection of them, called "Den 
Distelvink," — "The Thistle-finch," — which has now be- 
come exceedingly rare. This is a little volume of lyrical 
pieces, chiefly love songs, poems descriptive of his own perso- 
nal experiences and spiritual and devotional verses marked 
by a deeply religious feeling which was characteristic of the 
man, and which was well alluded to by the Dutch author, 
Johan Nieuwhoff, in his eulogistic lines upon Steendam : — 

" De gaaven van zyn Geest, in maatzang uitgeleezen, 

Verstrecken Godts gemeent een Harp die d'ooren streeld 
Met Davids Hemel-taal. Wie kan zijn kunst vollooven? 
Des Heeren Lofgezaag gaat alle Loff te boven." 



1 " Amsterdam, 

Waar dat ik jeugdig kwam. 

Van u ik lest mijn af-scheijd nam," etc. 

2 " Wy hebben kort daar na (met seven kloeke-Schepen), 
Den Spek een Fort ontmand ; dat wy met moet angrepen ; 
Waar op ik ban geleyd self in het cog van Mars," etc. 

' In a poetical epistle, dated at Fort Axem in Guinea, 7 Aug., 1642, to "the 
very bright young daughter and poetess Aafje Cornells, at Enchuysen," Steen- 
dam gives several of the details of his journey to Africa. He sailed out of the 
Texel on the 11th of October, 1641, with a fleet of twenty-seven sail, bound to 
various quarters of the globe, and which narrowly escaped destruction in a severe 
storm which overtook them on the 17th of October, off the Isle of Wight. On 
December 19, he arrived at the Castle of Delmijn in Guinea- 



THE POEMS OF STEENDAM 133 

His spirit's gifts divine, set forth in flowing song, 

Unto God's people give a harp which charms the ear 

With David's heav'uly theme. His art, what song may praise? 

The hymn of praise to God transcendeth all our lays. 

Many of the poems of Steendara are signed with the whimsi- 
cal pseudonym "Noch Vaster," — "still firmer," — which he 
seems to have adopted from some fancied appositeness to his 
own name, Steendam signifying "stone dam." 

His familiarity with nautical affairs gives a flavor of the 
sea to many of the verses of Jacob Steendam. In some of 
them, which are written with a vigor calling to mind the 
sea-verses of Campbell, one can almost hear the salt breeze 
whistling through the cordage of the West India Company's 
fleet as it sails southwards : — 

" Ye ploughers of the ocean 

And harrowers of the sea ! 
The ship Deventer goes before, 

And with the Koe sail we. 

Atid the Swan and Hind we see. 
To the Guinea coast of Africa we hie, 

To the golden Moorish land, 

Wherein God's mighty hand 
Hath planted our dominion far and nigh." ^ 

Always, whether upon the sea or the land, the poet finds 
some subject of moral reflection. In the "eyndelose wech," 
the endless wake of the ship as she sails through smooth 
waters, he sees the swift flowing away of an aimless human 
life; in the image of the anchor, he sees the right use of 
Time. So, too, hear " The Thistlefinch " singing to the 
newly married couple : — 

1 " Gij ploegers van den Oceaan 
En Eggers in de Zee. 
't Schip Deventer wil voor ons gaan, 
Wij volgen met de Ree, 
De Swaan en Hinde mee; 

Ons Oog-wit is Guine » 

In Africa. 

Het goud rijk Moren-land, 
Daar God krachtig heeft geplant 
Onsen Handel, voor en na." 



134 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

" A ship with sturdy timbers 

No haven long may stay, 
Tho' Neptmie's foaming billows 

Are roaring on her way ; 
But yet she hastens out, 

Her tarry tackle shining: 
Along her brown hull's sides 

A thousand links arc twining. 

" ' T is patience shows the helmsman 

The goal for which he steers, 
Tho' Thetis frowns upon him, 

And Triton's rage he hears ; 
Who with his dolphins all 

The very clouds is scaling ; 
The surly Sun-God too 

His face and rays is veiling. 

" Now read my hidden meaning : 

Ye and the ship are one ; 
The waning of affection, 

The storm and reefs to shun. 
A helmsman is provided, 

And youth's bright dreams to cherish ; 
The world's ways are the Sea, — 

The Gulf where many perish." ^ 

1 " Een schip seer vrel getimmerd 
Houd gecn havens-stee ; 
Schoon dat Neptunus schimmerd, 
Ein'schend op de Ree, 
Nochtans het ijld sich iiyt 
Met syn bepekte takels ; 
En bruyn geverfde huyd, 
Gehecht met duysend scliakels. 

" Geduld vertoond den Stuurmaii 
't Wit daar hy opdoeld 
A\ siet hem Thetis suur an, 
En of Triton woeld ; 
Die met syn Dollephijn 
Tot an de Wolken steygerd 
Daar Delius hem sijn 
Gesicht en Stralen weygerd. 

" Let nu eens op mijn Mening: 
Gij dan sijt het schip; 
d' Onheylen, echts-verkl^ning 
Is 't onweer en klip; 
Den Stuurman is u geeft 
En jeugds genegendheden 
De Zee (die m^nig vreest) 
Vertoond des Werelds zeden." 



"DEN DISTELVINK" 135 

In one sense, Steendam's name and his favorite poetical 
pseudonym are particularly appropriate : there is one quality 
conspicuous all through his writings, and it is that of stead- 
fastness. Some of his imagery is not of the most delicate 
description, and his phrases are occasionally prolix and in- 
volved ; but the earnestness of the man so illuminates his 
work that one would be no more disposed seriously to criti- 
cise his verses than those of Wordsworth or of Whittier. 
He seems from the very beginning to have kept steadily in 
view a plan of progression from higher to higher aims, — a 
design which he never lost sight of, and which he has set 
forth quaintly in the opening lines of "Den Distelvink." 

" Here by the Amstel's stream the Thistlefinch is singing, 
As though 't were but to-day he from the nest were winging. 
See how the callow bird, with artlessness elate, 
Already seeks to pair and blythely calls his mate. 
'T is sure that as he chirps so erst his elders sung. 
For as the old birds sing, so cliirp and pipe the young. 
Though with the nightingale's his song may not compare. 
He speaks in his own tongue and sings to his own ak : 
For tender little birds have feeble bills, I trow : 
But yet, O loving youths, another tune ye '11 know, 
If ye can only wait until his pinions grow. 
And upwards to the clouds he '11 soar from earth below." * 

Seven years spent under the tropical sun of Africa had 
added more than the years might indicate to the cares of 
Jacob Steendam and to his sense of the seriousness of life, 
when, in 1649, the long wished-for opportunity arrived for a 

1 "Hier singt den Distelvink omtrent des Amstels Stromen, 
AI3 of hy nyt den dop eerst heden was gekomen; 
Siet doch het naakte Dier beloont syn biydeu aart, 
Het soekt en smeekt syn helf t, en wenscht te zijn gepaart ; 
't Is seker so het pijpt ook eerst sijn ouders songen 
Want so den oiiden singt so pijpen ook de jongen. 
Schoon dat het niet en queelt gelijk den Nachtegaal, 
Het singt op sijn manier en spreekt sijn ej'gen taal. 
Want sachte vogeltjes die hebben weeke nebben; 
Ghy suit (0 foete jeucht) een ander deuntje hebben 
Indien gij wachten kunt, tot dat het veeren krygt 
En van de aerd om hooch tot door de wolken stijgt." 



136 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

return to the Netherlands. His health had suffered in the 
pestilential climate of the countr}-, — "this poisonous Africa," 
as he calls it;^ and he tells in his verses of the confused 
visions of "the World, the Flesh, and the Devil," which 
crowded upon him in the delirious hours of his fevers. 
Then, too, he suffered in one of the strongest attachments of 
his devoted nature, in the breaking up of the companionship 
between himself and his close friend Johannes FouUon, one 
of the principal mercantile agents in Africa of the West 
India Company, — a young man of about the poet's age, who 
returned to Holland in 1G45. Many of Steendam's verses 
are addressed to this friend. 

Jacob Steendam seems to have reached the Netherlands in 
the early part of the year 1649, for on or about the 21st of 
July of that year the first part of " Den Distelvink " was 
published at Amsterdam, and on the 20th of November of 
the same year, the second part of the work was published 
at the same place, while the third and concluding portion 
appeared on the 6th of Jul}^ 1650. Prior to this latter date 
Steendam seems to have been married to Sara de Rosschou, 
whose praises he had sung in some of the verses of the last 
part of "Den Distelvink." 

About the year 1652, Steendam arrived at New Amster- 
dam, but whether he was still in the employment of the 
West India Company is not known. In July, 1653, he 
purchased a small house and lot in Pearl Street directly 
under the walls of the fort, and here he appears to have 
resided for a short time, till he acquired, in the following 
year, the house upon Hoogh Straet, above described, which 
was his residence at the period of our survey. Besides the 
above parcels of land in New Amsterdam, Steendam owned 
for a time a house and garden upon the east side of Broad- 
way, about midway between the present Beaver Street and 

1 " Hy sal n (beliouden) brengen 
Uy t dit gif tig Africa ; 
Hy sal u de tijd verlengen, 
Tot in 't oud-Batavia," etc. 



STEENDAM IN NEW AMSTERDAM 137 

Exchange Place, and a garden spot, or piece of vacant 
ground, of about half an acre in extent, on the north side 
of the then recently laid out Prinse Straet (now forming an 
easterly extension of Beaver Street), between the present 
Broad and William streets. 

As to Steendam's occupation while in New Amsterdam, 
but little is known. A bill for a dozen cushions, supplied 
by him to the burgomasters of the town for their use in the 
Town Hall, has been taken as an evidence that he was in 
possession of the trade of an upholsterer, but this is a mere 
conjecture, and he calls himself indeed upon several occasions, 
a "trader." Like most of the citizens of New Amsterdam 
who possessed some capital, however, he was interested in 
farming operations, and soon after his arrival he became the 
proprietor of a plantation at Amersfoort upon Long Island, 
and of a tract of about thirty acres, doubtless woodland, 
upon the shore of the Mespat Kill, at present known as 
Newtown Creek. He seems to have been a prosperous man, 
and several mortgages to him appear upon the records during 
his sojourn in New Netherland. 

Steendam remained about eight years in New Amsterdam, 
returning to the Netherlands in the latter part of the year 
1660, as nearly as can be ascertained. He was deeply 
interested in the affairs of the Colony, and he deplored the 
neglected state into which it had been suffered to fall, 
between the indifference of the Dutch government on the 
one hand, and the failing circumstances of the West India 
Company on the other. It was with a view to excite public 
attention in the Netherlands to this condition of things that 
in 1659 Steendam sent there his first poem on the affairs of 
the Colony; this was called "The Complaint of New Am- 
sterdam to her Mother." After his return to Amsterdam, 
and about the year 1661, he published a poem of some 
length, entitled " The Praise of New Netherland, " dedicated 
to Cornells van Ruyven, then Secretary of the Colony, and 
this was followed in 1662, or soon thereafter, by a third poem, 
bearing the odd appellation of " Prikkel-Versen " (which has 



138 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

been well rendered as " Spurring Verses "), and designed for 
the purpose of urging on a proposed attempt by the city of 
Amsterdam to plant a colony on the Delaware River, upon 
land granted for that purpose by the West India Company. 

At the period of Jacob Steendam's residence in New 
Amsterdam, the creative powers of nature were still in full 
operation in the immediate vicinity of the settlement. A 
walk of ten minutes from his home brought him to rural 
solitudes along the Maagde Pact je, or Maiden Lane ; a walk 
of less than an hour brought him to the primeval forest 
beyond Director Stuyvesant's bouwery. The sight of the 
bountiful gifts of nature, open to all, seems to have inspired 
him with a wonderful confidence in the future of the land. 
The prospect was undisturbed by the troublesome questions 
of a vast and increasing proletarian population ; of boundless 
municipal and private extravagance; of an army of non-tax- 
paying professional politicians, drawing their support from 
the tax-paying classes; of enormous taxes, draining the life- 
blood from trade and commerce ; and of vice too great for the 
police power adequately to cope with. All these problems 
were far distant; the virtues and vices of the community 
were those of an infant state of society. Many of the people 
were poor, but those who were able and willing to labor 
could easily supply their simple wants, even though it were 

" Met suppaan en Harte vleysch," — 

with suppaan and venison ; and all might reasonably expect 
materially to better their condition. 

Steendam exulted in the land and in its capabilities; at 
the edges of the uplands, from under the roots of the beeches 
and alders, a thousand springs of the purest water gushed 
forth; around the settlement lay, in all directions, the virgin 
soil, "red, white, blue, and black," possessing the most 
varied qualities; everywhere he saw the "kills" rolling their 
full streams through the woods; all these it was his delight 
to extol in his verse. He had perhaps looked from the 



STEENDAM'S LOVE OF NATURE 139 

Bergen Heights upon the waving sea of reeds extending to 
tlie forest-chid hills far away to the west ; upon the beach at 
Corlaer's Hoek, he had wandered among the great boulders 
of gneiss and sandstone and trap, the detritus of the glacial 
age ; from his house upon the East River shore he had often 
watched the great forests of Long Island beyond the sand 
bluffs ; these, too, all appeared in his song. He was a close 
observer of the exuberant animal and vegetable life around 
him : from his own door he had seen the stately flight of the 
eagle, or the poising of the hawk over the East River, and 
the tumbling of the porpoises in the bay ; in sheltered coves 
along the shores of "the Company's Bouwerys " and their 
meadows, the wild ducks and geese swam in their seasons; 
at the edges of the swamps along "Bestevaars Killetje," back 
of Director Van Twiller's tobacco fields, and not far per- 
haps from where Washington Square now is, the wild tur- 
keys fed ; quail started up before him in the pastures along 
the Bouwery Lane; in the thickets upon the Sand Hills 
the partridge whirred past him ; and as he rambled along the 
banks of the "Great Kill," the otter slid into the water 
before him; the raccoon and fox, the marten and the mink, 
the rabbits, and the flying-squirrels, "leaping through the 
air," — he tells of them all. 

Everywhere, too, in the autumn woods, he saw the nut 
trees, with the ground beneath them covered with their 
ungathered stores ; in the common pasture fields and in the 
newly cleared lands, in early summer, he admired the profu- 
sion of the strawberries, " which in proud scarlet shine ; " in 
hedgerows and waste spots, — likely enough along Secretary 
Van Tienhoven's lane, where narrow and dingy Ann Street 
now is, — he had gathered the bark and the tender shoots of 
the medicinal sassafras in early spring, or the wild cherries 
in late summer; in the wet borders by Maagde Paetje, mint 
and catnip, tansy and the bee-haunted thyme grew thickly; 
and the gardens of the colonists were filled with kitchen 
vegetables without limit. To Steendam's enthusiastic mind, 
the whole country was a garden, and he sings : — 



140 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

" Siet, mijn tuyn leyd an twee Stromen 
Die van 't Oost, en 't Noorden komen, 
En haar storten in de Zee, 
Visch-rijk boven alien Mee." 

North and east two streams supplying, 
'Twixt the two my garden lying ; 
Here they pour into the sea, 
Rich with fish, beyond degree. 

The teeming life of the waters, in fact, excites his special 
admiration, and he tells of the sliad and the striped bass, of 
the sea bass and the blackfish, of the crabs, lobsters, mussels, 
and oysters, — 

" So large that one, in size, exceedeth three 
Of those of Europe." 

Even the humble sunfish and perch of the Kolck pond are 
not forgotten. 

In his close observation of nature (more than in his facility 
of expression), Steendam has something of kin to Robert 
Burns, and he could have well appreciated the Scotchman 
when he sings : — 

" Ev'n winter bleak has charms for me 
When winds rave thro' the naked tree ; 
Or frosts on hills of Ochiltree 

Are hoary gray ; 
Or blinding drifts wild-furious flee, 
Dark'ning the day. 

" O Nature ! a' thy shows an' forms 
To feeling, pensive hearts hae charms 1 
Whether the simmer kindly warms 

Wi' life an' light, 
Or winter howls, in gusty storms, 
The lang, dark night ! " 

Upon such a night — perhaps in the year of grace 1655 — 
Jacob Steendam sits in his armchair, meditatively contem- 
plating a blazing hickory log which lies in the ample fire- 
place of his house on Hoogh Straet : — 

" 't is noten-hout dat niemand heeft geplant,' — 



STEENDAM RETURNS TO PIOLLAND 141 

nut-wood, planted by no human hand! Outside, the wind 
whistles about the exposed dwelling; the snow drives 
through the dark street, where the shuttered windows give 
no light; and he hears the waves of the East River dash- 
ing with freezing spray upon the stones of the beach below 
the piling back of his house; but within doors the blaze of 
the odoriferous wood grows brighter and hotter, and he 
exclaims : — 

" Wiens heete vlam geen voclit noch koude wijkt, 
Wieiis geur, en reuk, (vol angenaamheyt), lijkt 
Na Eden's velden." 

Whose genial flame yields to no damp nor cold, 
Whose odors fragrant are as those of old, 
In fields of Eden. 

The house upon Hoogh Straet was sold by Steendam in 
September, 1G5G, to Jan Cornelissen van Hoorn, the ancestor 
of the Van Home family of the Colony. The poet remained 
several years longer in New Netherland, however, and for a 
time, about the year 1657, he is said to be " at present resid- 
ing in New Haven," but as to the business which took him to 
that place, and as to the length of his sojourn there, we 
have no information ; but in the summer of 1660 we find him 
preparing to return with his family to Amsterdam. He now 
entered into the employment of the Dutch East India Com- 
pany, and in 1666 he sailed from Amsterdam for Batavia on 
the island of Java, the emporium of the Dutch colonies in 
the eastern seas, he having received the appointment of Zie- 
kentrooster, or visitor and consoler of the sick at that place, 
— an inferior ministerial office in the church. At Batavia, 
Steendam was chosen, in 1668, governor of the Orphans' 
House in that city, and he held that office for several years, 
still exercising occasionally his poetical gifts, for he pub- 
lished here another collection of lyrical pieces, called " Zeede 
Zangen voor de Batavische Jonkheit," — "Moral Songs for 
the Batavian Youth." 

Here, then, Jacob Steendam ended his days amid strange 



142 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

and unfamiliar scenes. As he walked down the broad Heere 
Straet of that rising city, he could catch glimpses, on either 
hand, of canals with their bordering roadways, as he had 
often seen them at Amsterdam or at Rotterdam, but where 
the low-roofed Dutch houses which lined them were oddly' 
overtopped by tufted palm-trees, and the canals themselves 
bore uncouth names, such as the Lion's Graft, the Tiger's 
Graft, or the Crocodile's Graft. Lithe crowded market-place 
he saw, besides the Dutch and Portuguese from Europe, 
men of the varied races of southeastern Asia, — Chinese and 
Malays, Siamese and Cambodians, natives of Sumatra and 
of the Spice Islands, with the fat, sleepy-looking Javanese; 
occasionally perhaps a military detachment would pass him, 
on its way to some service or another in the island, where the 
Dutch soldiers, with their heavy muskets and with their 
field artillery, contrasted strangely with the long-haired, 
turbaned Amboynese auxiliaries, in the pay of the East 
India Company, bearing murderous-looking scimitars and 
oblong shields almost as huge as those which Jacob Steen- 
dam's ancestors had carried, when under the leadership of 
Civilis they had slaughtered the Roman legions sixteen 
centuries before. 

Every day, when the morning breeze sprang up, a crowd 
of vessels sailed into the port, as they had thronged by 
Enkhuysen with a favoring wind in Steendam's younger 
days; but here the Dutch ships were mingled with Chinese 
junks, and with all the extraordinary forms of naval archi- 
tecture made use of by the islanders. Looking landwards 
from the city walls, the broad plantations of rice and of 
sugar-cane which stretched away towards the dark mountains 
of Java, lay in a quivering haze in that climate where 

" With fearful power the noonday reigns, 
And the pahn-trees yield no shade." 

The slow flow of the Jacatara River through the heart of the 
city may have served to recall to Steendam memories of the 
Amstel and of Amsterdam; but there was little to bring to 



STEENDAM'S FAMILY 143 

his mind his house upon the East River shore at New 
Amsterdam, and that New Netherland of which he had 
sung : — 

" Dit is het Land daar Melk en Hoenig vloeyd ; 
Dit is 't geweest daar 't Kruyd, (als Dist'len) groeyd ; 
Dit is de Plaats daar Arous-Roede bloeyd ; 
Dit is liet Eden." 

This is the land where milk and honey flow ; 
Where wholesome herbs freely as thistles grow ; 
The land where Aaron's Rod its buds doth show ; 
A very Eden ! 

Jacob Steendam appears to have died at Batavia in 1671, 
or soon thereafter, when his wife was continued in the super- 
vision of the Orphans' House at that place. Upon the death 
of the latter in 1673, her daughter Vredegond succeeded to 
the same position, though very young. This daughter of 
Steendam, who was baptized in the Dutch Church at New 
Amsterdam, April 4, 1655, was in all probability born in 
the house upon Hoogh Straet, above described. Besides her, 
Steendam had two other children baptized in the Dutch 
Church during his sojourn at New Amsterdam; namely, 
Samuel, on November 18, 1657, and Jacob, on December 4, 
1658; whether the sons reached maturity is not known. ^ 

1 Most of the scanty particulars we have lespectiug the life of Steendam have 
heen gathered by Mr. Henry C. Murphy, and are given in his valuable mono- 
graph on the anthology of New Netherland. 



CHAPTER XIII 

JACOB VAN COUWENHOVEN AND HIS BREWERY.— PRINSE 
STRAET, AND ''THE GARDENS."— SLYCK STEEGH, OR 
MILL LANE. — THE BARK MILL. — DOMINIE MICHAELIS 
AND THE FIRST DUTCH CHURCH. — EVERT DUYCKINK 

" Holland ! Holland ! See, we sever 
Like a fleet, each wendiiig ever 

Towards his fore-appointed place. 
Farewell, farewell ! wiiate'er betide us 
This we know, that God will guide us, 
Whom we pray'd to be beside us ; 

Praised be His grace ! 
Amsterdam, 

Where in my youth I came, 
From you my last departure I must tell ; 
And all my friends together, fare ye well, 

I leave you, in God's name ! " 

Translated from Steendam's " Den Distelvink." 

NEARLY opposite the house of Jacob Steendam, upon 
Hoogh Straet, and occupying a part of the site of the 
building which stands upon the northeast corner of the present 
Broad and Stone streets, but fronting upon the latter street, 
stood at the time of our survey a house belonging to Jacob 
Wolfertsen van Couwenhoven. This man, with his two 
brothers, Peter and Gerrit, were the sons of WoKert Gerrit- 
sen, of Amersf oort, a town of considerable size, about twenty- 
five miles southeast of Amsterdam, and a few miles south of 
the Zuyder Zee. That town had suffered grievously in 1629 
from its occupation by an Austro-Spanish army, in the drag- 
ging war which Spain was vindictively carrying on against the 
United Provinces, and there is strong probability that it was 
this misfortune that led Wolfert Gerritsen and his sons to seek 



JACOB VAN COUWENHOVEN 145 

a home in New Netherland in the following year. The sons 
themselves at this time would seem to have been men of mature 
years; at any rate, Jacob van Couwenhoven was familiarly 
known about the town, in 1655, as " old Jacob." The father, 
for several years prior to 1639, hired one of the newly cleared 
farms of the West India Company,^ being the one commonly 
known as " Bouwery No. 6," the farmhouse of which stood 
upon the east side of the present Chatham Square, its land 
lying generally between the present Division Street and the 
river shore. 

The brothers appear to have been men endowed with gen- 
erous and kindly dispositions ; and in 1646, after the death of 
their father, and of their brother Gerrit, when they came to 
divide their slender patrimony, they allowed, by an agreement 
which is still extant, to Jan, one of the young children of their 
deceased brother, 100 guilders more than to the others, 
"because he has not as good health as the others, and is weak 
in his limbs, and to all appearance will not be a stout man." 

Amersfoort, the native town of the Van Couwenhoven 
brothers, with its great church spire towering high above a 
picturesque landscape of hill and dale, — quite different from 
the general character of the scenery of the Netherlands, — • 
was, in the seventeenth century, the seat of an active transit 
trade of tobacco, beer, malt grains, etc., between the Nether- 
lands and Germany ; barges from Amsterdam and from all the 
ports of the Zuyder Zee saiHng up the small river Eem to the 
town, whence a short land carriage brought their freight to the 
banks of the Rhine. Many of the inhabitants of Amersfoort 
were familiar with the brewer's trade, and among these was 
Jacob van Couwenhoven. He appears to have had the design, 
from an early day, of establishing a brewery in New Amsterdam, 

^ His first employment was at Rensselaerswyck, near Albany.where f or a time 
he was superintendent of farms for the patroon Van Rensselaer. After coming 
to New Amsterdam, he was one of the purchasers, in 1636, of a tract of land from 
the Indians at what is now known as Flatlands, south of Brooklyn, but to which 
he gave the name of New Amersfoort. His lands here, after his death, passed 
to his sons, and the descendants of his son, Gerrit, under the name of Couwen- 
hoven, or Kouwenhoven, are still numerous upon the western end of Long Island. 

10 



146 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

and for this purpose, as early as 1645, he had obtained from 
Director-General Kieft, the grant of " a lot for a dwelling- 
house, brewery, and garden, lying behind the public inn." 
This was a plot of ground of about sixty-five English feet 
front, by more than one hundred feet in depth, situated also 
on Hoogh (Stone) Straet, and a couple of hundred feet east of 
the parcel we are more particularly describing. Here, Jacob 
van Couwenhoven commenced operations by building for 
himself a substantial stone dwelling-house ; by the time this 
was completed, he found himself so heavily in debt, — the 
unusual sum, for those days, of about 3,500 guilders, or 
$1,400 on his house alone, — that his brewery project was 
deferred, perforce, for a number of years. Van Couwen- 
hoven was, in fact, an inveterate speculator, and wherever 
any piece of property was offered for sale at what he thought 
was a " bargain," such as the old church building near the 
shore, or the old horse mill property upon Slyck Steegh (now 
South William Street) back of his house, he stood ready to 
buy it, without the least regard to his ability to pay for it. 
It was perhaps in this way that he had become, prior to 1654, 
possessed of the plot of ground we are more particularly 
describing, at the corner of " the Ditch " and of Hoogh 
Straet : that piece of land had been originally granted to one 
Antony Jansen, but had been abandoned by him and allowed 
to become, as the records express it, " a stinking pool," and 
in 1646 it had been regranted to the prominent shipping 
merchant, Govert Loockermans, who was a brother-in-law of 
Jacob van Couwenhoven, their wives being sisters. Hester 
Jansen, the wife of Jacob van Couwenhoven, had died seem- 
ingly in the early part of the year 1655, and he, with his 
family of four or five young children, still occupied the stone 
house down Hoogh Straet at the time of our survey, while 
the plot at the corner of the present Broad Street, upon which 
a brick dwelhng-house had been built, probably either by 
Govert Loockermans or by Jacob van Couwenhoven himself, 
was at this time occupied by the mother of his deceased wife. 
Adjoining this latter house, upon the east, stood, in 1655, 



VAN COUWENHOVEN'S BREWERY 147 

two small houses owned by Mighiel Paulussen, who followed 
the occupation of a carter. The westernmost of these was 
hired out to different tenants, and in the latter part of 1655 
became the abode of Joseph d'Acosta, one of the Portuguese 
Jews, whose rough reception at New Amsterdam in the previ- 
ous year has been already alluded to ; ^ the easternmost of the 
two houses was occupied by Paulussen himself ; he was from 
Vraendoren, in the Netherlands, and had married, in 1640, 
Maria, daughter of Joris Rappalje, who with her elder sister 
Sara are supposed to have been almost the first children of 
European extraction who were born in the colony. ^ 

It was upon the site of these latter houses, adjoining his 
own plot, which lay to the west, that Jacob van Couwen- 
hoven about this time determined to erect his long-planned 
brewery. There was a good well upon the premises which 
was probably an object to him in his undertaking, and which 
possibly still e.dsts under the buildings at present covering 
the site. In the course of the next year, 1656, he had made 
arrangements with Paulussen for the acquisition of the 
ground and houses of the latter; the buildings were de- 
moHshed or removed, and here, upon the site of the present 
Nos. 27 and 29 Stone Street, Van Couwenhoven commenced 
the erection of his brewery, which was a substantial edifice 
of stone, and evidently of considerable size, for it is usually 
spoken of, in the records, as "the great stone brew-house." 
All this time he was greatly hampered by his debts : in Au- 
gust, 1656, one of his creditors, Pieter Jacobsen Marius, made 
an application to the burgomasters that Van Couwenhoven 
should be required to sell some of his property, and apply 
the proceeds to the liquidation of his debts ; " otherwise," the 
petitioner says, " he knows not when he shall obtain his own." 
Van Couwenhoven appeared and stated to the burgomasters 
that he had abeady placed in the hands of tlie Schout, or 
bailiff, his deed of the old church property upon the strand 

^ See mite, page 85. 

^ The claims of Jan Vinje to the houor of having heen the first white child 
born in New Netherland will be considered farther on. 



148 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

(purchased by him only three or four weeks before), to be 
held as security. As Jacob was one of the oldest citizens, 
generally well esteemed, and prominent in the church (he 
had been, in 1647, one of the church-wardens, in conjunc- 
tion with Director-General Stuyvesant, and Jan Jansen 
Damen, specially chosen to complete the church edifice in 
the fort), the burgomasters were loath to adopt extreme 
measures ; he was therefore notified by the magistrates to sell 
his property at private sale, and satisfy his creditors within 
fourteen days, or in default thereof, the Schout would be 
ordered to sell the same at public auction. Under this spur, 
he sold the old church lot, on the 8th of September, 1656, to 
Isaac de Foreest, and in December of the same year he sold 
at public auction his stone house, a little farther down Hoogh 
Straet, to Nicholas de Meyer, after which he seems to have 
taken up his residence upon his lot, at the corner of the 
present Broad Street, adjoining his as yet unfinished brewery. 
He was still heavily embarrassed, however, but in the latter 
part of 1656, we find his friend, Isaac de Foreest, coming 
forward to assist him. De Foreest presented at that time a 
petition to the Director-General and Council, for permission 
to contract in advance with Jacob van Couwenhoven for all 
the beer the latter could brew in the space of a year, " so 
that such a well-situated brewery as that " (of Van Couwen- 
hoven), "may not be abandoned, but to the contrary may 
become the means to maintain decently that man with his 
family, while otherwise his ruin might be unavoidable." 

These various measures seem to have been of no more than 
temporary relief. In September, 1655, " old Jacob " had mar- 
ried Magdalentje Jacobse ; his first wife's children seem to 
have been possessed of some property which was in their 
father's hands and which was deemed by their other relatives 
to be in jeopardy; for upon January 3, 1657, Pieter van 
Couwenhoven his brotlier, and Govert Loockermans, the hus- 
band of his late wife's sister, make an application to the 
Council for the appointment of guardians for the children, 
alleging that Jacob " has been inclined to enter into second 



VAN COUWENHOVEN'S BREWERY 149 

nuptials, and is grossly encumbered with several heavy debts, 
which he is daily increasing." 

Jacob van Couwenhoven treated with contempt, however, 
the demand of the guardians for an accounting : he could not 
keep track of his own affairs ; how then could they expect 
him to know anything about those of any one else. The 
guardians were forced to report to the Council that although 
they had " strained every nerve," they could get no account 
from Jacob of his situation : an order of Council for his arrest 
followed promptly, but, as nothing further appears, it is to be 
presumed that Van Couwenhoven patched up some kind of 
an account of his children's estate. 

The brewery was finished, probably by 1657, but the affairs 
of its proprietor were apparently hopelessly involved, and by 
the year 1663 Van Couwenhoven had surrendered his brew- 
ery and its contents to his creditors ; the latter appear to have 
permitted Jacob to operate the brewery for several years, but 
in December, 1670, some months after Jacob van Couwen- 
hoven's death, his executors conveyed the property to several 
individuals, — Oloff van Cortlandt, Johannes van Brugh, Cor- 
nells van Borsum, in right of Sara Kiersted, his wife, and Hen- 
drick Vandewater, who appear to have been a sort of syndicate 
of creditors. 

Upon the westerly side of the house and brewery of Jacob 
van Couwenhoven, a narrow and irregular passageway ran, 
in 1655, along the ditch occupying the middle of the present 
Broad Street; and the grants of land along it infringed 
largely — in some cases to the extent of twenty feet or more 
— upon what we now know as Broad Street.^ At the period 
mentioned, four houses had been built along the easterly side 
of this passageway : of these, it will be sufficient to indicate 
in a general way the sites and the owners' names, as none 
of the latter were of particular prominence. At the north 

^ In 1670 the Court of Burgomasters made an order that the fence of Van 
Couwenhoven's property here " should be drawn back and set on the common 
line " of the street. 



150 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

corner of the present South William Street stood the house 
of Adriaen Vincent, who in 1649 is spoken of as " late cadet 
in the company's service," and as having come from " Aecken," 
which is perhaps a village of that name, some six or seven 
English miles from the old city of Ghent. Vincent had ac- 
quired this plot of land and built here about 1646. 

About forty feet farther north was the house of Simon 
Felle, a Frenchman from Dieppe in Normandy who in 1652 had 
purchased a house and a small plot of ground from Adrieen 
Vincent : four years later he married Anneken Vincent of 
Amsterdam, a relative, either sister or daughter of Adriaen. 
Fifty feet more intervened between this house and that of 
Abram Rycken, one of the older colonists, and the ancestor of 
the Riker family of the present day ; he had built here as 
early as 1647. A similar interval brings us to the house of 
Jochem Beekman, a shoemaker, which stood near the corner 
of a narrow cross-road, later known as Prinse Straet, and 
which, somewhat widened, exists to day as an easterly exten- 
sion of Beaver Street ; Beekman had purchased a small plot 
here from Abram Rycken, and had built in or about 1652. 

As for the Prinse Straet, it and a line a few rods north of 
the present Beaver Street, west of Broad, formed the southerly 
limit of the West India Company's reserved parcel of pasture- 
ground, which has already been spoken of ^ as having been 
leased to Jan Jansen Damen in the spring of 1638 : upon the 
termination of that lease, 1644, the Director and Council de- 
termined to grant portions of the land in building plots, and 
for that purpose the narrow Prinse Straet was laid out along 
the southern bounds of the field. At the period of our sur- 
vey the street apparently contained but two houses : one was 
upon the north side, and about eighty-five feet east of the 
present Broad Street ; it had been built about the year 1652 
by Albert Pietersen, from Hamburgh, a trumpeter in the 
service of the West India Company. The other house stood 
upon the south side of the street about fifty feet from Broad 
Street, and belonged to Lourens Petersen, who had found 

1 See ante, page 9. 



THE TUYNEN OR "GARDENS" 151 

his way to New Amsterdam from the seaport of Tonsberg 
at the mouth of the Christiania Fiord in Norway. The 
house is mentioned as standing here as early as 1647. Be- 
yond this point, the old pasture-field had been recently 
broken up into plots of about one-half acre each, which 
in 1654 had been granted to several of the magnates of the 
settlement, — to Nicasius de Sille, member of the Council, to 
Secretary Van Tienhoven, to Carel van Brugge, late commis- 
sary at Fort Orange, and to Dominie Samuel Drisius. These 
plots extended up to the present Wall Street, and were not 
as j'^et improved at the time of our survey : they were the tuy- 
nen or gardens ; and a few years afterwards, when the pres- 
ent Exchange Place was laid out through them, it was called 
by the Dutch, Tuyn Straet, and by the English subsequently, 
Garden Street. 

Back of the house and brewery of Jacob van Couwenhoven 
ran a narrow lane, not very agreeable to the eye, perhaps, in 
the seventeenth century, but of considerable interest at the 
present day, in the widened and somewhat extended form 
under which it is known as South William Street. It is of 
especial interest because it is one of the earliest and quite 
probably the very earhest of the Dutch thoroughfares re- 
maining as originally located. Its origin can be traced 
back clearly to the year 1625 or 1626, — to a period when 
there was as yet no occasion for a road along the East River 
shore, when Broad Street was a swamp and nothing more, — 
when Beaver and Marketfield, Stone and Bridge streets had 
not been thought of, and when the site of Broadway was 
covered with trees and bushes. 

When the first Dutch vessels arrived in 1625, with agri- 
cultural colonists for Manhattan Island and for its immediate 
vicinity, they brought with them over one hundred head of 
cattle, besides a considerable number of horses, sheep, and 
hogs. As the few inhabitants of the place, who for the pre- 
vious thirteen or fourteen years had been clustered about the 
log block-house under Hendrick Corstiaensen's command, 



152 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

were mostly Indian traders, depending for their sustenance 
upon supplies from the neighboring Indians and from the 
Netherlands, they had not engaged in agriculture, and in all 
probability the island was still in an uncleared condition, 
almost up to the blockhouse itself, since the wood which the 
inhabitants needed for building purposes or for fuel would 
naturally, owing to the difliculties of land carriage, have been 
floated or brought by boat from points along the shores. 
There being no place in which the cattle of the new colonists 
could be securely kept upon Manhattan Island, we are in- 
formed that on their arrival they were at first landed upon 
Nutten, now Governor's Island, and allowed to roam at large 
there until a proper enclosure could be constructed for them 
upon the island of Manhattan. The necessary clearing and 
enclosure was commenced at once, and was without doubt the 
tract of ground extending from a short distance north of the 
line of the present Beaver Street to a line about forty or 
fifty feet north of the present Wall Street, which latter limit 
marked the southern boundary of the Vinj^ or Damen farm, 
which must have been soon established after the period above 
mentioned. It is uncertain whether this enclosure extended 
farther west than the present Broadway, though it is quite 
probable that it reached the North River shore : upon the 
east it probably extended a short distance east of the present 
William Street. This tract, or the portion of it east of 
Broadway, formed the reserved land or pasture of the West 
India Company, which, as we have seen (ante, page 9), was 
in 1638 leased to Jan Jansen Damen, having been then 
supplanted by the later pasture-ground, or " commons," now 
forming the City Hall Park and its vicinity. 

The land thus enclosed, however, was nearly cut in twain 
by the as yet undrained swamp along the present Broad 
Street, and a passageway became necessary to the eastern 
portion of the enclosure ; from the rude bridge thrown across 
the brook which drained the swamp, a narrow lane led along 
the line of the present South William Street, and turning 
northwards near the spot now occupied by the western end of 



THE SLYCK STEEGH 153 

the well-known Delmonico building which stands at the in- 
tersection of South William and Beaver streets, it reached 
the pasture at a point a little north of the line of the latter 
street. The northern turn to this lane became unnecessary 
after the opening of Smith's Street (present William Street) 
in 1656 or 1657, and tliat portion of it was granted within a 
few years thereafter to private parties. It is shown, upon 
" the Duke's Plan " of 1661, and upon the Nicoll plan of 1668, 
as still partially open, but built upon and obstructed. After 
Hoogh (Stone) Straet had become a thoroughfare along the 
river, an opening was made from the lane into the latter 
street, and this still exists under the name Mill Street or Lane, 
a mere open passageway between two buildings. 

As might be supposed, this narrow lane running through 
low ground and trodden at first by the negro wood-choppers 
and bark-gatherers of the West India Company, then by the 
cattle driven to and from the pasture field, and eventually 
abutted upon by the rear of the houses and lots along Hoogh 
Straet, was never considered a particularly choice locality. It 
was not until 1672 that it was ordered to be paved, and then 
apparently only with foot-paths. In the Oude Zyd, or old 
quarter of the City of Amsterdam, there was a narrow street 
of just about the same length as this lane, running between 
two of the canals of the city. It was situated in a district 
replete with interesting associations ; standing at the western 
end of this street, where it opened upon the canal known as 
the Achter Burg Wal, one saw at his left several ancient 
buildings whose arched gateways opened into spacious en- 
closures, — these were relics of the old Romanist days, two 
convents long before suppressed and converted into a portion 
of the Great Hospital of Amsterdam ; beyond them was the 
old church of the Knights Templars, and the ancient Turf 
Market ; these edifices and grounds half surrounded another 
building, of a very different character, on the opposite side of 
the Achter Burg Wal canal and at its termination; it was 
the famous Heerelogement, — the City Hostelry, open to none 
but persons of standing and distinction ; its capacious quad- 



154 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

rangle stood surrounded by moats like a fortress, and was ap- 
proached over an arched bridge. To the right of the observer, 
across the same canal, was another famous building, — the 
ancient convent of St. Cecilia, changed in the year 1594 to 
another hostelry of exclusive character, known as the Prins- 
senhof, which was associated with the names of many per- 
sons of distinction who had sojourned there : prominent among 
these were Marie de M^dicis, Queen of France, and her beau- 
tiful but unfortunate daughter, Henrietta Maria, wife of 
Charles I., King of England. The other, or eastern end of this 
street, also opened out upon noteworthy localities : immedi- 
ately to the right were the walls of the Oude Mannen Huys, 
or Home for the Aged, — one of the noble charities of the 
good Hester Klaas, in the sixteenth century ; while at the 
distance of two or three blocks to the left stood the Dol Huys, 
or Hospital for the Insane, — likewise a sixteenth-century 
foundation ; and beyond this was the great house of the East 
India Company. 

Notwithstanding the proximity of its lofty neighbors, how- 
ever, the little street in question remained very unassuming 
indeed, and had received the humble appellation of Slyck 
Straet, or the Muddy Street. It was perhaps in remembrance 
of this street at home — since nearly every street in New 
Amsterdam bore the name of a corresponding street in the 
old city — that the lane we have been describing received the 
designation of Slyck Steegh. When the English began to 
come into the town, after the surrender in 1664, the names of 
the streets were changed or modified in many instances. The 
Slyck Steegh is spoken of in certain deeds about the year 1679 
as " Dirty Lane," and about 1683, as " the Mude Street." Al- 
though Dirty Lane was a familiar, not to say prominent, London 
street in the seventeenth centurj^^ the name never became 

1 " He mounted synod-men, and rode 'em 
To Dirty Lane and Little Sodom," etc. 

[Butler's Hudibras, Part IL, Canto i., 367.] 

In 1830, besides the historic "Dirty Lane" of "Hudibras," — in Southwark, 
near the notorious " Mint," — there was another street, with the same official desig- 



THE OLD BARK MILL 155 

popular in New York, and the Slyck Steegh gradually came 
to be called, from the horse-mill upon it (of which we shall 
speak). Mill Street or Lane. It retained this name till about 
1882,1 when it was extended through into William Street, and 
its former historic name was changed to the singularly inap- 
propriate one of South William Street. 

However uninviting the Slyck Steegh may have been from 
an aesthetic point of view, New Yorkers should not forget that 
upon its northern side was erected, in 1626, the earUest build- 
ing in New Amsterdam, of which the site can be pointed out at 
the present day. By a communication from the colony in 
the above year,^ it is stated that Francois Molemaecker (the 
mill- Wright) is employed in the construction of a horse mill, 
with a spacious room, to accommodate a large congregation, 
and it was at that time also proposed to add to it a tower, in 
which the bells captured by the Dutch and brought from Porto 
Kico were to be hung. This mill, with its small belfry tower, 
the conical roof of which can be distinguished in the Justus 
Danckers View of New Amsterdam, of about 1650, was erected 
upon the north side of the lane afterwards known as the Slyck 
Steegh, and upon ground at present covered by the buildings 
Nos. 32 and 34 South William Street, occupied as a wine 
storehouse. The mill, which was one of three erected by the 
West India Company at its new settlement,^ was employed in 
the grinding of bark to be used for tanning purposes, and its 
location near the edge of the Broad Street swamp was doubt- 
less determined by the availability of the ground for tan pits. 
Here, then, in the loft, or upper story of the bark mill, in 

nation, in the Strand, near the Savoy, and still another one in Shoreditch, not 
very far from St. Leonard's chnrch. 

1 In the eighteenth century, it was occasionally spoken of as "The Jews' 
Lane," from the Jewish synagogue which stood upon its north side. 

2 Set forth in Wagenaar's Hist. Verhael., Amst., 1621-32. 

' The others were wind-mills, one a saw-mill situated on Nutten or Governor's 
Island ; the other, a grist-mill, seems to have stood upon the bluff above the North 
River shore, a short distance northwest of the fort. Upon its accidental destruc- 
tion by fire, a uew one was built a little southwest of the fort. It is the earlier 
grist-mill which is shown in the Hartgers View of New Amsterdam, of about 1632. 



156 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

1628, Dominie Jonas Michaelis assumed the charge of the first 
religious congregation within the limits of the present State of 
New York, He was a man of middle age, who was born in 
North Holland in 1577, and who had entered as a divinity 
student at Leyden, in the year 1600, where he is said to have 
been contemporaneous with the famous Dutch scholar, Ger. 
Johannes Vossius, and with Jacob Cats, who afterwards 
attained such great fame as a poet, in the Netherlands. Of 
his further history we know but little, save that it is stated 
that he was settled as pastor at Nieuwbokswoude, a village in 
North Holland, in 1612, and two years later, in the church at 
Hem (Hemsteede ?). In 1624, upon the taking of San Salvador, 
in Brazil, from the Portuguese, by the Dutch Admiral, Heyn, 
Dominie Michaelis received the appointment of minister at 
that place. The town being retaken in the next year by the 
Portuguese, however, MichaeUs was transferred to the Dutch 
possessions on the coast of Guinea, then recently captured 
from the Portuguese ; he did not remain here long, however, 
for in 1627 he returned to the Netherlands, and in January of the 
following year he sailed for New Amsterdam. He was evi- 
dently a man of considerable mental attainments, for at New 
Amsterdam he preached at times in the French language to 
the Walloon settlers. His sole literary remains of which we 
have knowledge are to be found in a letter to the fatherland, 
bearing date August 11, 1628, in which he appears to be 
an earnest and patient minister of the Christian religion, 
struggling against more than common trials in the new 
country in which he had cast his lot.^ 

Both Dominie Michaehs and his congregation must have 
often found themselves contrasting painfully the new condi- 
tions surrounding them with the old. Among the men and 
women who met here to worship, there were those who remem- 
bered the Oude Kerk — the old church — of Amsterdam, 
with its thirty environing chapels, dark with the very rich- 
ness of their stained glass adornment, and wliere a score of 
many-branched lustres shed a soft hght on the benches of the 

1 See the letter, with notes of Doctor O'Callaghan, in 2 N. Y. Col. Doc. 763. 



DOMINIE MICHAELIS AND HIS CHURCH 157 

grave magistrates of the city, and on the marble tombs of great 
men who had died for their country on land and on sea, in the 
yet unfinished war for Dutch independence ; others had mem- 
ories of the great church of St. Lawrence at Rotterdam, look- 
ing down majestically upon the placid canals which environed 
it, and upon the statue of that giant of intellect, Erasmus ; 
some had listened to the chiming of the four hundred bells of 
the "New Church" of Delft, or had contemplated with reverence 
the tomb of William the Silent in that famous edifice; some 
had worshipped in the subKme cathedral of Antwerp, the lofty 
and solemn Gothic arches of which were a sermon in them- 
selves. Now, from the windows of their unadorned loft over 
the bark mill on the edge of Blommaert's Vly, they looked 
northward over a rough pasture-field gently sloping up to a 
low ridge of hills, where the trees which then covered the 
Pine Street and Cedar Street of to-day were gradually disap- 
pearing under the axes of the negro wood-choppers ; looking 
to the east, between them and the East River shore, and upon 
the broad river itself, and in the Long Island forests beyond, 
no signs of human life were discernible, unless perchance an 
Indian canoe or two paddled along the shore; only to the 
southwest, across the narrow swamp which intervened, a few 
thatched cottages clustered around the slowly rising walls of 
the fort. 

To many of the congregation of Dominie Michaelis in this 
rude place of worship, the lessons of religion must have 
appealed with peculiar force amidst the hardships and uncer- 
tainties with which they were surromided, and in the loss of 
most of the old associations of their fives. Death came, too, 
and within these rough walls often sounded the solemn words 
of the reader : " Ik ben de opstanding en het leven ; die in 
mij gelooft, zal leven, al ware hij ook gestorven ; en een 
iegelijk die leeft, en in mij gelooft, zal niet sterven in 
eeuwigheid," — recalling to his hearers the profound mystery of 
the Resurrection and the Life ; even the good Dominie himself 
must have heard them with new emotions when, in the very year 
of his arrival, he, with his two fittle motherless daughters, fol- 



158 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

lowed the funeral procession of his deceased wife over the 
little bridge, across the Marckveldt, and to the barren spot 
just north of it, upon a hillock overlooking the North River, 
where the dead of the new settlement slept their last sleep in 
umnarked graves. The retirement of Dominie Michaelis, and 
the advent of Dominie Bogardus, in 1633, was marked by the 
erection of a separate church building near the river shore, 
and upon the present Pearl Street, of which previous mention 
has been made.^ The bark mill, no longer required for public 
uses,2 seems to have been in part turned into quarters for some 
of the negro slaves of the West India Company. In a deed of 
1643, this, with a parcel of land adjacent, is spoken of as " the 
negroes' plantation," being doubtless a vegetable plot culti- 
vated by them ; in another instrument, of 1656, it is alluded to 
as " the house the negroes live in." Somewhere about this 
latter period, a new bark mill was established by private parties, 
very near the southwest corner of the present Broad Street 
and Exchange Place, and the old mill, which was under the 
control of the Deaconiy of the Church in 1660 (and which 
may, indeed, have been so controlled from the period of its use 
as a church), was sold in 1663 to Govert Loockermans, and 
remained in existence many years.^ 

The only other house which appears to have existed upon 
the Slyck Steegh, in 1655, was that of Evert Duyckink. This 
man, who was a glassmaker from Borcken, in Westphalia, a 
small town a few miles beyond the boundary of the Nether- 
lands, received a grant of somewhat more than half an acre 
of ground upon the north side of the Slyck Steegh, in 1643. 
Marrying, two or three years later, Hendrickje Simons, a young 
woman from his own district in Westphalia, he appears to 
have built upon this ground, and to have resided here a 

1 See ante, page 58. 

2 It seems to be the mill referred to in a report of 1638 to the West India 
Company, as being then out of repair. 

^ In 1667 Loockermans sold the old mill to Jacques Cousseau; the latter sold 
the premises to Carsten Jansen in January, 1671, and in 1679 Janseu's executor 
Bold the same to Clement Sebrah. 



EVERT DUYCKINK'S HOUSE 159 

number of years .^ The location of his house is uncertain, 
but there are some reasons for supposing that it stood nearly 
one hundred feet east of the bark mill, and upon or very 
near the site of the present buildings, Nos. 20 and 22 South 
William Street, but some twenty-live feet or more back 
from the north side of the lane. In 1674, Duyckink, who 
had some time before removed to another part of the town, 
sold his house on Slyck Steegli, with what then remained of 
his original plot (being in size about three city lots), to Jacob 
Melyn, the son of Director-General Stuyvesant's old antago- 
nist, Cornells Melyn. Jacob Melyn held this property for many 
years, but it does not seem to have been a profitable invest- 
ment for him, for in or about 1697, he being then a resident 
of Boston, we find him giving a letter of instruction to 
Abraham Schelhnger of Easthampton, Long Island (who was 
probably his nephew, the son of his sister Cornelia, wife 
of Jacob Schellinger, already referred to), to repair to New 
York and endeavor to sell his house on Mill Street, " and if 
no sayle can be obtained, nor person be to be gott to live in 't on 
any acct., then to naile up doors and windows with roff 
boards, and secure the glass." The agent was not, however, 
forced to this last resort of a disgusted landlord, for in May, 
1697, he sold the premises to Doctor Johannes Kerf byl, formerly 
of Amsterdam, a prominent physician of his day in the city. 
Doctor Kerfbyl was a resident of the city as early as 1686, when 
we find him dwelling upon the west side of Broad Street. He 
is said to have been a graduate of Leyden, and was at one 
time a member of the Governor's Council at New York, but 
his success excited jealousy among some of his neighbors, and 
he was denounced as a "charlatan." It was probably the 
Doctor's son, of tlie same name as his father, who was natu- 
ralized by Act of Parliament, in 6 Anne (1707). As for the 

^ His family included Cornelis Jansen, an orphan lad of thirteen years at the 
period of our survey, whose parents had been killed by the Indians at their 
farm at Sapokanicau (tlie later Greenwich), in the war of 1643. Their three 
children, aged respectively four, three, and one years of age, at that time, were 
received Jito different families in the town. 



160 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

Doctor himself, he must have died soon after his purchase of 
this property in 1697. The premises then passed into the 
hands of Jewish purchasers, and became the site of the first 
Jewish synagogue in New York, which was estabhshed here 
between the years 1697 and 1700.^ 

^ The closed portion, or northerly turning (before referred to) of the Slyck 
Steegh, appears to have been in part in the possession of one Richard Elliott, a 
cooper, in the latter part of the seventeenth century. This man, who was a resi- 
dent of New York as early as 1672, dwelt here for many years with his wife and 
four sons. Of the latter, three died young and unmarried, while the fourth son, 
Henry, went to sea about the year 1701, and was never again heard of. Both 
Elliott and his wife died prior to the year 1714, and as no person appeared to 
claim any interest in the property, it remained apparently ownerless till 1721, 
when, under the legal procedure then in force, tlie property was adjudged to have 
escheated to the British Crown for want of heirs. Thereupon the Council made 
the following curious order, — a handsome tribute to the worthy and modest 
pastor of the little French Huguenot Church on King (now Pine) Street: "For- 
asmuch as his Majesty's Council of this province did conceive that the granting 
thereof " (that is, of Letters Patent of the escheated land) " as an encouragement 
to learning, could not but be acceptable to his Majesty, and that they knew not of 
a more proper and deserving person of such favor than Mr. Lewis Rou, minister of 
the French Church in this city, who in Divinity, History, and Cronology [sic], 
and many other parts of learning, is as great a master as any in his Majesty's 
colonies in America ; " they therefore give their assent to the issuing of Letters 
Patent to him. This is apparently the property now occupied by the rear addi- 
tion, upon South William Street, of the Delmonico building. 



CHAPTER XIV 

THE HOUSES OF BARENT JANSEN, JAN NAGEL, CLAES 
CARSTENSEN, AND JOCHEM C ALDER.- PIETER AN- 
DRIESSEN AND HIS TROUBLES WITH THE INDIANS.— 
NICHOLAS DE MEYER. — WESSEL EVERTSEN, THE FISH- 
ERMAN—RUT JACOBSEN 

UPON the north side of Hoogh (Stone) Straet, and im- 
mediately east of the ground where, soon after the 
period of our survey, Jacob van Couwenhoven erected his 
brewery, already mentioned, there stood, in the year 1655, 
three small houses in close juxtaposition. The eight-story 
yellow brick building of an electrical construction company, 
which now covers the site of these humble dwellings, towers 
above the surrounding warehouses, as the cottages them- 
selves were over-towered in the seventeenth century by Van 
Couwenhoven's "great stone brew-house." 

The first, or westernmost of these buildings, was the house 
of Barent Jansen. He was one of the earlier colonists, but 
hardly anything in relation to him can be gleaned from the 
records. His very patent or ground-brief for this land can- 
not be found, and its existence is only learned by allusions to 
it in other instruments. It was a parcel of about thirty-seven 
English feet frontage upon Hoogh Straet, and it extended 
back to the Slyck Steegh. Upon its western side it would 
appear that Barent Jansen must have built a small house at 
an early date. Intimately connected with Jansen in some 
way — probably by marriage — was one Claes Carstensen, a 
Norwegian of middle age, from the village of Sonde in the 
southern part of Norway. 

Barent Jansen must have died before the spring of 1647, 

11 



162 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

for in March of that year a grant which had been made to 
him, of fifty morgens, or about one hundred acres of land on 
the west side of the Hudson River, but for which he had 
never received his ground-brief, was vested, by the Director 
and Council in Claes Carstensen. In what way this latter 
individual obtained an interest in the Hoogh Straet property 
we do not know; but soon after 1647 he is found in posses- 
sion of a small house upon the easterly half of the Jansen 
grant, which house he sold a few years after that date to Jan 
Nagel. As to the house upon the westerly side of the plot, 
supposed to have been built by Barent Jansen, it appears in 
1662 as then in the joint occupation and tenure of Claes 
Carstensen and of Jan Barentsen Kunst, probably the young 
son of Barent Jansen. 

Claes Carstensen, together with Jan Forbus (usually 
spoken of as Jan de Swede), Pieter Jansen Noorman, Dirck 
Volckertsen and Jacob Haes, formed a little clique of 
Scandinavians, closely associated in various enterprises, and 
owners at an early date of a large portion of the lands em- 
braced in the present Williamsburgh and Green Point in 
Brooklyn. 1 

The dwelling-house held by Claes Carstensen upon the 
eastern part of Barent Jansen's ground, as above mentioned, 
was sold by him in 1653 to Jan Nagel, who resided here 
at the time of our survey. This man, who was from 
Limburg in the Netherlands, had come to New Amsterdam, 
like many others among the colonists, as a soldier in the 
employ of the West India Company, and is spoken of in 
1647 as "late cadet" in that service; in later years he was 
commonly known as "Sergeant Nagel." Jan Nagel must 
have died about the year 1657, but his son, of the same 
name,2 became prominent some twenty years later, as one of 

1 Carstensen was, it seems, in high repute among the colonists on account of 
his acquaintance with the Indian language. Riker, in his " History of Harlem," 
states that he acted as interpreter, upon the occasion of the treaty with the 
Indians at the general gathering upon Sclireyers Hoek, south of the fort, on 
August 30, 1645. 

2 This son, who was born in 1653, seems to have been really named Jeuriaen 



THE NAGEL FARMHOUSE 163 

the earlier settlers of the town of Haerlem, who with his 
associate Jan Dykman, ancestor of the family of that name, 
restored to cultivation the farms on the extreme northern 
end of Manhattan Island, which had been devastated by the 
Indians in 1655, and had lain waste and abandoned for more 
than a score of years. The small antiquated yellow farm- 
house, which, with its decaying orchard and neglected fields, 
— almost the last remnants of the farming days of Manhattan 
Island, — was still to be seen as late as the beginning of the 
year 1901 upon the banks of the Harlem River just below 
King's Bridge, and which often excited the curious attention of 
the traveller approaching New York City on the trains of the 
New York Central Railway, must have stood very near the 
site — if not exactly upon it — of the Nagel farmhouse of 
the seventeenth century ; ^ and the uncared-for burial-ground 
of several generations of that family lies a few hundred feet 
west of the site of the house. The spot, with its memories 
of Indian warfare, of the murdered Tobias Teunissen, and of 
the marching, counter-marching, and fighting of Americans, 
British, and Hessians in the War of the Revolution, ought to 
have been preserved and maintained by the City of New 
York, as one of the very few surviving mementos of early 
days. 

But to return to our survey of Hoogh Straet ; the third, or 
easternmost of the three small houses previously spoken of 
as occupying, in the year 1655, the site of the present large 
building known as Nos. 31 to 35 Stone Street, was the 
cottage of one Jochem Calder, who had obtained a ground- 
brief for the land in 1645, and who seems to have built within 
a short time thereafter upon the westerly side of his plot of 
about thirty-seven English feet in frontage. Very little 

Jansen Nagel, but, like many others of the colonists, he was rarely known by his 
christened name. He married, while still very young, Rebecca, the daughter of 
Resolved Waldron. 

^ It was destroyed by fire soon after the date above mentioned. The small 
Dntch bricks which are worked into the substantial foundations of this house 
afford additional support to the statements in the text. 



164 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

information, however, can be gathered from the records 
respecting this man; he had died prior to 1659, in which 
year his widow Magdalena married Gysbert Teunissen. 

Passing over two garden spots, or vacant places, belonging 
to this last-mentioned plot and to the next one, we come to 
the house of Pieter Andriessen, upon the site of which at 
the present day stands the building No. 41 Stone Street. 
Andriessen was a native of the province of Brabant, in the 
Netherlands, and came over to New Amsterdam in 1639 in 
the ship " De Brant van Trogen " (" The Conflagration of 
Troy"), with Captain Jocliem Pietersen Kuyter and Jonas 
Bronck. Upon their arrival at New Amsterdam, Andriessen 
and one Laurens Duytts, his fellow-passenger upon the vessel, 
were hired by Jonas Bronck to undertake the clearing of a 
tract of five hundred acres which Bronck purchased from the 
Indians upon his arrival, and which lay upon the mainland 
beyond the Harlem River; it covered what is now known as 
Morrisania, and Pieter Andriessen and his co-laborer were 
therefore the pioneers of the present Borough of the Bronx.^ 
How long Andriessen was employed upon Bronck's land we 
are not informed. Jonas Bronck died about the year 1643, 
and his property passed into other hands. In 1645, Andries- 
sen obtained the grant of his lot of about thirty-seven feet 
front on Hoogh Straet, and no doubt soon built there, as the 
officers of the West India Company were, as a rule, disposed 
to insist upon a speedy improvement of plots granted by them 
in the town. In the fall of the same year, however, he also 
acquired a farm of about one hundred and fifty acres upon 
the East River shore of Long Island, being a tract upon 
which one Jan Jacobsen Carpenel, familiarly known as Jan 
of Haerlem, had previously begun a clearing. This farm, 
which covered the middle portion of the locality along the 

^ The agreement between Bronck, Andriessen, and Duytts in 1639, is still 
extant. Bronck was to advance to the two men 121 florins to pay their board 
upon the ship. The two were to have liberty to plant tobacco and maize upon 
Bronck's land upon condition that they should break up a certain quantity of 
new land every two years, surrendering the other to the owner, for the planting 
of grain. 



PIETER ANDRIESSEN'S FARM 165 

East River shore, generally known some years ago as Ravens- 
wood, extended about half a mile back from the river to a 
small stream called in later times Sunswick Creek, which is 
yet to be seen flowing through a narrow salt meadow. The 
site of the farmhouse here was nearly opposite the foot of 
the present Fifty-fifth Street on Manhattan Island. Pieter 
Andriessen, however, had an additional occupation to that 
of a farmer ; he was a chimney-sweep, — an employment of 
considerable importance in those days of wood fires and of 
thatched roofs, — and from that fact he was commonly 
known in the town as Pieter de Schoorsteenveger. As this 
occupation of Pieter must have necessitated his frequent 
attendance in the town, and as he does not appear to have 
married till a comparatively late day, he seems to have been 
in the habit of shifting his quarters backward and forward 
between his house on Hoogh Straet and his plantation on 
Long Island, as occasion might require. Neither of these 
establishments was on a very magnificent scale, it is probable, 
and the farm on Long Island seems to have been tenanted by 
several negro slaves of Andriessen. 

In 1648, Pieter Andriessen appears in the list of tavern- 
keepers in the settlement. As, however, his house upon 
Hoogh Straet was directly opposite the " Great Tavern " of 
the West India Company (afterwards the Town House), it is 
hardly probable that he would have been permitted to main- 
tain a tavern there, and he is much more likely to have kept 
liquor upon tap at his Long Island farm, to accommodate his 
few neighbors and their workmen, as well as the wood- 
cutters, quarrymen, and boatmen whose employment called 
them up and down along the East River. 

In September, 1655, after the outbreak of the Indian 
troubles of that year, there was a general flight to New 
Amsterdam of the panic-stricken settlers who had survived 
the first onslaught of the Indians. Hastily throwing their 
personal effects into the boats with which most of them were 
provided as means of conveyance, and turning loose into the 
woods the cattle, which in general they could not remove, 



166 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

tliey abandoned their exposed plantations, and with their 
families took refuge under the guns of Fort Amsterdam. 

Unlike the Indian attacks of 1643-4-4, that of 1655 was 
directed, in many instances, not so much to murder and to 
general devastation, as to securing captives for the sake of a 
ransom. In this way the abandoned plantations were often 
spared, in the hope apparently of entrapping the colonists. 

Four weeks had gone by since the first attack by the 
Indians, when Pieter Andriessen determined to take a party 
out to his plantation on Long Island, in order to try to re- 
cover some of his cattle. The party, consisting of Andriessen 
and five others, sailed up the East River one October morning, 
and finding nothing to alarm them, landed at Andriessen's 
farm, and set about scouring the neighboring woods and 
thickets for the animals. The Dutch, however, had been 
discovered by a party of Indians, Avho, to the number of 
about thirty, set upon them and took them all prisoners. 
Sending two of their captives back to New Amsterdam, with 
a statement of what the captors required in the way of cloth, 
lead, gunpowder, kettles, guns, knives, shoes, axes, etc., — 
as a ransom, — the savages retained Andriessen and three of 
his companions as their prisoners, all but one of these being 
wounded. As, however, Andriessen's party had left the 
town without the knowledge and consent of the military 
authorities, and indeed against an express prohibition, the 
Director and Council, after much discussion of the case, 
declined to act for various reasons, one of which was "be- 
cause when the other savages, who keep yet seventy-three 
prisoners of our nation, understood that such an extravagant 
ransom ^ has been paid for four, tliey would demand a more 
enormous sum." Andriessen and his comrades, therefore, 
remained in the hands of the savages for a while longer; but 
within a couple of weeks, — apparently stimulated by the 
threat of the Indians, to carry the remaining captives into the 
interior of the country — the authorities at New Amsterdam 

1 The value of the goods required may have amounted to $150 or $200 of 
the present currency. 



DE RUYTER'S CHICKEN EXPEDITION 167 

came to an agreement with the natives respecting the amount 
of ransom, and most or all of the prisoners were restored. 

Matters, however, remained in a very unsettled condition, 
in spite of the apparent settlement with the Indians; and 
frequent reports of depredations in the vicinity of New 
Amsterdam (of which the natives generally disclaimed any 
knowledge), kept the community in a constant state of uncer- 
tainty and dread. While things were in this state, there 
sat, on the night of the 4th of November of this year, 1655, 
around a blazing fire on the wide kitchen hearth of Pieter 
Andriessen's rough farmhouse near the East River shore, his 
negro slave Stephen, and a crony of the latter. Captain 
Francis Fyn's negro man, who had rowed across from his 
master's farmhouse on Varcken (now Blackwell's) Island, 
for a social evening. With this pair of worthies was Claes de 
Ruyter, a Dutchman of jovial disposition from New Amster- 
dam, who is understood to have been a former trooper in the 
West India Company's service. The negro Stephen had 
evidently been sent to take charge of his master's property, 
either because he ran comparatively little risk of being car- 
ried off by the Indians, or because Pieter Andriessen himself 
was not yet recovered from the effects of his late encounter 
with the savages. The presence of Claes de Ruyter, how- 
ever, at this time and place, is not susceptible of so easy an 
explanation. 

Rations seem to have been rather scanty with the party at 
Pieter Andriessen's house; the keen autumn air had given 
them sharp appetites; and as the long evening wore away, 
some one — we will suppose it was Stephen — remembered 
that there were some chickens left upon the farm of the 
nearest neighbor, Joris Stevensen de Caper. The trio 
promptly agreed that these fowls ought not to be left for 
the Indians, or for wolves, wild-cats, and foxes, and an expe- 
dition was determined upon to recover some, at least, of 
them. A walk of about a mile, over rough pasture-fields, 
and through woods and thickets, brought the party in sight 
of the low farmhouse of Joris Stevensen. This house, of 



168 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

which all vestiges have long ago disappeared, was situated 
on the edge of the salt marshes nearly half a mile east of the 
present Queens County Court House in Long Island City, — 
just where De Caper, or "the sailor," could bring his market- 
boat almost to the door of his house by sailing up a small 
creek called Canapaukah, a branch of the Mespat Kill, or 
present Newtown Creek. Joris Stevensen's family had 
abandoned their exposed dwelling, as had most of the 
farmers' families in the country, but the men came to the 
farm occasionally to attend to necessary work. To guard 
against any interference by possible inmates of the house, 
the marauding party commenced operations by a vigorous 
battering against the door of the house, accompanied by a 
whole storm of blood-curdling yells and war-whoops, in 
which we may suppose that Claes de Ruyter, who was 
familiar with the Indians, and who often acted as go-between 
for them and for the whites, bore a prominent part. The 
expedition was, in short, entirely successful, and Claes and 
his companions returned to Pieter Andriessen's farmhouse, 
where they calmly proceeded to pluck and to dress their 
plunder. 

In the mean time the Joris Stevensen farm had not been 
entirely deserted. That individual himself, together with 
his father-in-law, Harmen Hendricksen, and one Teunis 
Jansen van Commel, had been engaged during the day in 
threshing out some grain, and at night had disposed them- 
selves to sleep in the barn. Scared almost out of their wits 
by the supposed Indian attack, and fearing to be discovered 
or burned in the barn, they had escaped into the night and 
sought places of concealment for themselves in various 
directions. One of the fugitives made his way across the 
jEields to the house of his neighbor Andriessen ; here he dis- 
covered a light, and approaching carefully to reconnoitre, he 
heard, to his great joy, some conversation in Dutch; there- 
upon he boldly entered the house, where his appearance was 
about as agreeable to Claes de Ruyter and the negroes as was 
that of Banquo's ghost to Macbeth in the banqueting hall 



BURNING OF JACOB HAES'S HOUSE 169 

at the palace of Fores. The party had, in fact, just spitted 
Joris Stevensen's fowls, and were caught red-handed. Claes 
was profuse in his apologies, expatiated on the desperation 
of starving men, promised to pay for the fowls when he 
returned to town, and incidentally suggested that it was 
not necessary to say anything about a trifling matter of this 
kind. 

News of this affair found its way to New Amsterdam, 
however, and produced a considerable effect upon the author- 
ities there, for it showed them that other agencies besides the 
Indians might be at work keeping up the state of disorder in 
the country. While this occurrence was yet fresh, on the 
morning of the 8th of November, 1655, the people of New 
Amsterdam were again excited by a spectacle which had been 
too common during the preceding few weeks, — a column of 
smoke rising above the woods from some burning building 
along the East River shore. The precise location of the fire 
was not determinable from the town, but soon news arrived 
from up the river that it was the farmhouse of Jacob Haes, 
situated beyond the Noormans Kill, on the shore of what is 
now called Green Point. On this same morning, Director- 
General Stuyvesant, with Nicasius de Sille, one of the mem- 
bers of his Council, appeared before the court of burgomasters 
in the Town Hall with a request, which was duly entered 
upon the minutes of that body, "that the fiscal rigidly 
examine Tennis Jansen as to what he saw at the house 
of Pieter Schoorsteenveger; whereas, now Jacob Haey's 
house is burning, and it might possibly happen in the same 
manner." 

An examination into the late pranks of Claes de Ruyter 
followed, accordingly, but we do not find that it threw any 
light upon the later affair, and the matter seems to have been 
dropped without any further proceedings. Stuyvesant and 
his Council were determined, however, to prevent troubles 
of this sort in future ; and upon the 18th of January, 1656, 
followed the famous "Order against Isolated Plantations," 
commanding all the subjects of the Colony to settle close to 



170 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

one another in villages, neighborhoods, and hamlets, by the 
following spring, imposing a penalty upon such persons as 
remain upon exposed plantations, and giving them notice 
that they must not expect any aid from the authorities in 
case of trouble with the natives. Four years later, in fact, 
owing to frequent disregard of the ordinance, notice was 
given by the Council to farmers still living uj)on isolated 
farms, to pull down their houses, and it is believed that a 
few houses were actually destroyed under the orders of the 
authorities, before the surrender to the English, in 1664, 
rendered the ordinance of the Council obsolete. 

After these proceedings of the Council, there is room to 
suppose that Pieter Andriessen became, for a time at least, 
a permanent resident of his house on Hoogh Straet. He 
married, in 1661, Geertruyd Samsens, a widow, and we find 
that in 1664 he had a daughter, Jannetje, baptized in the 
Dutch Church; but in 1668 it appears that both he and his 
wife had died, and two years later the Hoogh Straet house 
was sold, by the representatives of her estate, to Barent 
Coersen. 

Next adjoining the house of Pieter Andriessen upon the 
east, in a garden of nearly seventy-five feet front upon 
Hoogh Straet, stood at the time of our survey the dwelling- 
house of Jacob van Couwenhoven, previously alluded to,^ 
which was sold in the following year to Nicholas de Meyer. 
This building was of stone, and of much greater pretensions 
than most of its neighbors, for at its sale to De Meyer, which 
was at public auction, it was already mortgaged for about 
3500 guilders, or $1400 of the present currency; it stood 
upon the site of the present buildings, No. 47, and a part of 
No. 45 Stone Street. This house was occupied as a residence 
for more than thirty years by Nicholas de Meyer. He was 
from Hamburg, then claimed to be under the jurisdiction of 
the Duchy of Holstein, from which cause he was occasionally 
called by the Dutch of New Amsterdam, Nicolaas van Hol- 

i See ante, p. 146. 




Stone Stkeet. 

Looking- towards Hanover Sciuare. The ancient Hoosh Straet. 



NICHOLAS DE MEYER 171 

steyn. The ordinary appellation of De Meyer (that is, the 
"steward" or "farmer") seems, however, to have been 
preferred by Nicholas and his descendants, and became the 
family name. Nicholas had married, in 1655, Luda, or 
Lydia, daughter of the ex-fiscal, or prosecutor, Hendrick 
van Dyke ; he became, in later years, a man of considerable 
prominence in the city, having been one of the magistrates 
in 1664, at the time of the surrender to the English. After- 
wards, in 1676,* he was mayor of the city. He was a man 
of active business interests and took a considerable part in 
developing the settlement of the village of Haerlem, where he 
had purchased various parcels of land amounting to between 
sixty and seventy acres in extent; he also owned a wind-mill 
near the intersection of the present Chatham and Duane 
streets, and a brewery in the Smits VJy, or modern Pearl 
Street, near Piatt Street. After the death of Nicholas de 
Meyer, in 1690, the property upon Stone Street was divided, 
and the original homestead passed to his daughter Anna 
Catrina, wife of Jan Willemsen Noering. The eldest son 
of Nicholas, Wilhelmus or William de Meyer, became a 
prominent citizen of Esopus and Kingston in the present 
county of Ulster. 

As we advance along the road, or "High Street," farther 
eastwards from the fort, the plots granted to settlers become 
larger, for they were given at a time when there was no 
immediate likelihood of a demand for the land for the con- 
struction of dwellings. In this way, Wessell Evertsen, the 
next neighbor to Van Couwenhoven and to Nicholas de 
Meyer, obtained in 1646 the grant of a parcel of land with a 
frontage of nearly two hundred and twenty-five feet along the 
road, and extending back to the Slyck Steegh. Evertsen 
came from the old town of Naerden, upon the south coast 
of the Zuyder Zee, some thirteen or fourteen miles east of 
Amsterdam, — an interesting place, with many a tradition 
of Spanish atrocities perpetrated here in the war for inde- 
pendence; a picturesque spot, too, where the flat western 



172 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

coast of the Zuyder Zee, and the interminable dyked 
meadows in the direction of Amsterdam, give place to the 
heights of Gooiland; and where, to the observer gazing 
southeastward, — 

*' A brighter, livelier scene succeeds ; 
In groups the scattering wood recedes, 
Hedge-i'ows, and huts, and sunny meads, 
And corn-fields glance between," — 

till he might well imagine himself among the fields of 
Kent or of Essex, rather than in a corner of the province 
of Holland. 

Having come to New Amsterdam, Evertsen married, in 
1643, Geertje Bouwhens, a young woman from his old home, 
and had probably built upon his plot on Hoogh Straet, as 
early as 1645, a year or so before he obtained his ground- 
brief. He was a seafaring man, and in 1648 is spoken of 
as "late master of the yacht Saint Martin;" but his main 
occupation, which he followed for many years at New 
Amsterdam, was that of a fisherman, and from his house, 
which, adjoining a capacious garden, stood about upon the 
site of the present building. No. 55 Stone Street, a path or 
lane, which remained open for many years, led down directly 
to the mooring-place of his boats upon the East River shore. 
A couple of hundred feet to the west of this last-mentioned 
spot was the tall building of the city tavern, for the bright 
lio-hts of which Wessell Evertsen had doubtless often strained 
his eyes, sailing up the bay, belated on his fishing trips, — 
much as he might have watched, at home in the fatherland, 
for the lights of the historic Castle of Muyden on the Zuyder 
Zee, as he ran up, on dark nights, from Amsterdam to 
Naerden, through the broad channel of the Pampus. 

Here, then, upon Hoogh Straet, Wessell Evertsen lived 
for many years, and saw a large family grow up around him. 
The extreme eastern end of his plot of ground he had sold 
as early as 1649 to one Rut Jacobsen, but he retained the 
balance of it till about 1657, when the increasing demand for 



ELLIOTT'S ALLEY 173 

building lots in the town induced him to sell one small parcel 
after another, till in the course of live or six years he had 
disposed of all the ground except that in the immediate 
vicinity of his dwelling-house. Evertsen appears to have 
died shortly before 1670, but the place remained in the pos- 
session of his descendants as late as the year 1726. 

The parcel of land just before alluded to as forming the 
eastern end of Wessell Evertsen 's grant, and as having been 
sold by him in 1649 to Rutger (commonly known as Rut) 
Jacobsen, must have been built upon by the latter at about 
the period named, and it was doubtless at the same time 
that the narrow lane bounding it upon the west, and which 
formed the southerly turn to the Slyck Steegh, was laid out. 
This passageway, under the name of Mill Lane, is still to be 
seen opening into Stone Street, as was previously noticed ; ^ 
and the site of Jacobsen 's plot is at present occupied by a 
low but spacious brick building of two stories, conspicuous 
for its large windows, and occupied by the Board of Marine 
Underwriters. The entrance to this structure is upon South 
William Street, where was originally the rear of Jacobsen's 
premises. As for the passageway now called Mill Lane, and 
sometimes Mill Street, it was known for a time, about the end 
of the seventeenth century, as EUet's or Elliott's Alley, from 
Richard Elliott, previously mentioned (ante, page 160, note), 
who lived just at its head upon the Slyck Steegh. Rutger 
Jacobsen, at the time of his purchase of this property upon 
Hoogh Straet, was a resident of Rensselaerswyck ^ (now 
Albany), and although he undoubtedly resided at times in 
New Amsterdam, he does not appear to have given up his citi- 
zenship at the former place, for in 1656 he was one of the mag- 
istrates of Rensselaerswyck, and as such, in that year, he laid 
the corner-stone of the new Dutch Church, the site of which 
was at the intersection of the present State Street and Broad- 

1 See ante, page 153. 

- Jacobsen came from Schoonrewoerd in the Netherlands, a village some 
twelve English miles south of Utrecht. His daughter Margrietje married, in 
1667, Jan Jansen Bleecker, from Meppel in the province of Overyssel, ancestor of 
the Bleecker family, well known in the annals of New York. 



174 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

way, in the city of Albany. The house at New Amsterdam 
was retained by Jacobsen till the fall of 1G60, when it was sold 
at public auction to one Johannes Withart. It would seem to 
have been used by Rut Jacobsen either as a place of tempo- 
rary residence for himself and family when in New Amster- 
dam, or as a storehouse connected with the North River 
trade, he having been, as early as 1649, the owner of a 
sloop plying upon the Hudson between Rensselaerswyck and 
New Amsterdam. After Withart these premises came to be 
noted as the residence of Nicholas Bayard, long conspicuous 
in the affairs of the city, mayor in 1685, the deadly personal 
enemy of Jacob Leisler, and the man above all others respon- 
sible for the judicial murder of Leisler and his son-in-law 
Milborne in 1691; bold and turbulent, he pitted himself 
against the Earl of Bellomont, Governor of the Colony, was 
himself condemned to death for treason, and very narrowly 
escaped Leisler's fate. His large farm and country seat west 
of the Bowery became one of the prominent features of New 
York in the eighteenth centur}-. He purchased the house 
upon Stone Street from Johannes Withart in 1685, the year 
of his mayoralty, but had resided in it for a number of 
years before that period. 



CHAPTER XV 

THE "GREAT TAVERN," AFTERWARDS THE TOWN HALL.— 
ITS HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL ASSOCIATIONS. — DOM- 
INIE BOGARDUS'S PARTY.— THE COURTS. — THE SHIRT 
CASE.— GOVERNOR LOVELACE'S TAVERN 

The Taverner tooke me b}' the sieve, 

" S' " sayth he, " will you o' wyne assay ? " 

I auswerd, " that can not mutch me greve 
A peny can do no more than it may ; " 
I dranke a pynt, and for it dyd pay, 

Yet sore a hungred fro thence I yede, — 

And wantynge my mony I cold not spede. 

Lydgate : " Loudon Lyckpeny." 

THE traveller, in the middle of the seventeenth century, 
approaching Amsterdam up the broad estuary of the 
Y, from the Zuyder Zee, and rounding a point of flat meadow- 
land intersected by canals, where some years later the vast 
dock-yards, timber wharves, and storehouses of the Admi- 
ralty and of the East India Company arose, saw at his left 
hand, stretching for two miles along the shore, the array of 
houses of that famed city, broken here and there by canals, the 
mouths of which were occasionally marked by ancient stone 
towers of quaint form, the survivors of the bulwarks of former 
days. At a distance of a few hundred feet from the shore 
extended an apparently interminable double line of " booms," 
— stout piles driven into the earth and fastened together at 
the tops by string pieces, and to these were moored an almost 
countless host of vessels of all descriptions, — 

'* Meer vloten als hesit de tceerelt, op het Y ; " 

the smaller craft only were permitted to pass within the line 
of booms. Sailing by the mouth of the broad Amstel River, 



176 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

crowded with boats and barges, as it flowed placidly through 
the heart of the city, and passing the Haaring pakkers Tooren, 
— the Herring-packers' Tower, — where it stood guard over 
the entrance to the canal, called the " Cingel," the voyager saw 
before him a long pier running out from the shore to a point 
beyond the line of booms ; at its extremity was a large, high- 
peaked wooden building, constructed upon piles, moored 
around which was a swarm of yachts and rowboats of vari- 
ous descriptions. This building was the Stadts Herbergh, or 
City Tavern of Amsterdam ; it had been built in the early 
part of the seventeenth century, to furnish lodging and enter- 
tainment to seafaring men, and to travellers who might arrive 
in the city by night-coming vessels, or after the closing of the 
land gates. The commodious quarters afforded by this tavern, 
and its agreeable outlook over the land and water, caused it to 
be held in high repute. 

About the year 1640, when the trade of New Amsterdam 
was already considerably extended, it was thought desirable, 
by the officers of the West India Company, to afford better 
accommodations for strangers in the town than were furnished 
by the small and rude taverns which already existed there. 
It was decided to establish, somewhat after the pattern of 
Amsterdam, a Stadts Herbergh, or City Tavern, under the 
auspices of the West India Company. This building was a 
substantial edifice of stone, and was completed during the 
year 1641. It was designedly placed in a very conspicuous 
position near the shore of the East River, which one of its sides 
faced, and at the time of its erection it formed a most promi- 
nent landmark, standing entirely apart from the houses of the 
town. Back of it lay the road, or Hoogh Straet, from which 
a lane or passageway on the east side of the building gave 
access to the open space between it and the shore. This lane, 
after the City Tavern had become, in 1654, the Stadt Huys, or 
Town Hall, was frequently spoken of, in English times, as 
the " State House Lane," or " Hall Lane ; " it exists at the 
present day as the narrow passageway, known as Coenties 
Alley, a curious little dark street between high and almost 



THE STADTS HERBERGH 177 

blank walls ; it is overhung by rusty fire-escapes, and furnished 
with miniature sidewalks, of about two feet wide. 

The original ground-plot attached to the City Tavern, 
appears to have been a strip about fifty feet in width, extend- 
ing from Hoogh Straet to the East River shore, but in the 
year 1651, upon the confiscation of the adjoining land of 
Cornells Melyn,i enough of that land appears to have been 
added to the tavern plot to make the whole parcel about one 
hundred and five feet in front upon the shore, and a few feet 
less than that distance upon Hoogh Straet. The premises, so 
enlarged, seem to have been then surrounded by a fence ; pre- 
viously, they had been open and unenclosed. The additional 
ground was doubtless used for a time for garden purposes.'*^ 

Collating carefully the various deeds for portions of these 
premises, made from time to time in the eighteenth century, 
after the Town House had ceased to be used for public pur- 
poses, — some of which deeds refer expressly to lines of the 
old building, while other dimensions of the latter result from 
well-known principles of architecture, — the conclusion is 
reached that the ground-plan of the City Tavern must have 
been about forty-two feet front ^ by about thirty-two feet in 
depth ; in height it contained two stories, with a basement 
underneath and spacious lofts above.* In the rear of the 
building was an extension or addition, of which only the 
eastern wall is definitely fixed ; this appears to have been a 
long, narrow structure used for kitchen purposes, and prob- 
ably containing other offices of a similar nature. The present 
northerly line of Pearl Street would seem to have encroached 
somewhat upon the site of the City Tavern, as will be seen 
from the accompanying plan. 

1 See ante, page 120. 

2 Miuates of the Burgomasters, 15 November, 1658. On Johannes Nevius, 
the secretary's petition, wliereinhe requests that he may plant the garden behind 
the Town Hall, — Ordered, that the petitioner may plant the garden, in conjunc- 
tion with the court messenger. 

^ That is to say, its later front upon what is now Pearl Street ; its original 
front was tov.-ards the west. 

* Under its steeply pitched roof. 

12 



178 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

The Stadts Herbergli appears to have been opened for the 
entertainment of the public about the beginning of the year 
1642, Philip Gerritsen from Haerlem being the first landlord,^ 
and the premises being leased to him and afterwards to 
Adriaen Gerritsen (who had married Philip's widow), down 
to the beginning of the year 1652, when we find Abraham 
Delanoy conducting the tavern. The terms of the lease 
were sufficiently liberal. Philip was to pay the company 
three hundred guilders per year, or about $120 of the present 
currency ; he was to sell the company's wines and brandy 
only, for which he was to be allowed a profit of six stivers 
(about twelve cents) per quart, the company agreeing not to 
allow any wines to be sold at retail out of its cellar, " which 
might be drunk in clubs, and would tend to the lessee's 
injury." The Director-General, at the same time, promised 
to have a well dug near the house, and to cause a brew-house 
to be put up in the rear of the tavern or else to give the use 
of the company's brew-house, and moreover to permit a space 
to be fenced off in the rear of the house. 

The City Tavern was hardly more than opened before it 
became historic. Many of the fugitives from the outlying 
settlements, in the Indian War of 1643, were quartered here. 
On the 18th of Sej^tember of that year, there arrived in the 
town the distressed colonists of Achter Col (near the present 
Elizabethport), which had been destroyed on the preceding 
night by the Indians. These people, who had collected in a 
building there, managed with great difficulty to make their 
escape in a canoe after the house in which they were gathered 
had been set on fire ; they kept off the Indians by means of 
their firearms, but lost everything else. They were lodged in 
a body at the City Tavern at the expense of the West India 
Company. 

Here, too, in the beginning of 1651, was quartered the crew 
of the ship " Nieuw Nederlandsche Fortuyn, " — the vessel of 
the Baron van der Capellen, — seized and confiscated by order 

1 Philip Gerritsen's lease bears date February 17, 1643, but runs from the 
Ist of January, 1642, for six years. 



Plan of the Stadt Huys or Town 
Hall of New Amsterdam 

Compiled by J. H. INNES 

Scale, JO feet = ^ incA 



-^ocj^/i <!Srraet A^^"* ^7.) 




R efe r e nc e s : 

Main building of the Stadt Huys. 
Extension, supposed to have been a kitchen, etc. 
Small lots granted by the Burgomasters, 1664 — 6b. 
Lane or Alley to the Stadt Huys enclosure. 
e. Site of ta-vern built by Go-v. Lo-velace, l6yo. 
ff. Present line of Pearl Street. 



c c. 
d. 



THE CITY TAVERN AND ITS ASSOCIATIONS 179 

of Director-General Stuyvesant ; nominally, on account of an 
alleged infraction of tlie revenue laws, but really to gratify 
his hatred against Cornells IVIelyn, whom he believed to be 
a partner in the vessel, — for which proceeding the West 
India Company had to make satisfaction afterwards in the 
Netherlands.^ 

The tavern, indeed, from an early day was in frequent use 
as a place of detention for suspected persons and for various 
political or other prisoners. For this purpose, some portion 
of the building — probably a part of its basement — must 
have been specially prepared. Afterwards, when the edifice 
came to be the Town House, a part of it was used as one of 
the regular prisons of the town, and the provost, or jailer, 
was obliged to divide his attentions between the prisoners 
confined here and those within the fort, who were also in his 
charge. 

In this way various persons who had become obnoxious to 
the Director and his Council were kept in detention from 
time to time at the City Tavern, and later at the Town 
House. Here was kept in durance, in 1647, the Scotchman 
Andrew Forrester, of Dundee, the agent of the Earl of Stirling, 
for asserting his principal's rights to Long Island, under his 
purchase, in 1629, from the Plymouth Company, — till he 
was packed off in the fall of that year to the Netherlands to 
vindicate his conduct before the States-General. Here, in 
1655, the Enghshman, George Baxter, was confined: he had 
been for many years in the employ of the Company in a 
military capacity, but had fallen out with the Director-Gen- 
eral and Council, and had attempted to raise a sedition against 
the Dutcli authorities at Gravesend. To the To^vn Hall, in 
the spring of 1656, were marched the luckless English in- 
truders, twenty-three in number, who had attempted, under 
a claim hostile to the Dutch, to make a settlement at the 
present Westchester. Sailing up the East River in his ship, 
the " Weigh-Scales," Stuyvesant's lieutenant, "the valiant 
Captain Frederick de Koninck," and his forces proceeded in 
^ See ante, page 119. 



180 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

boats up the Westchester Creek, and captured the entire new 
colony, which, with the exception of a few who were left to 
guard their wives, children, and property, he conveyed to New 
Amsterdam, where they were lodged in what they call " a 
dungeon at the Court House " till they were ready to comply 
with the demands of the Dutch authorities. 

Such matters as these, liowever, did not interfere with the 
attractions of tlie City Tavern as a social resort, and it soon 
came to be patronized by many of the better class of citizens, 
and by the officials of the West India Companj'-, who fre- 
quently made up parties for a supper and a social evening 
there. These were not always free from unpleasant occur- 
rences, as we learn. On the night of the 15th of March, 1644, 
there were gathered in Philip Gerritsen's parlor in the City 
Tavern, Doctor Hans Kiersted, Dominie Bogardus, Nicholaus 
Coorn, Jan Jacobsen, Gysbert Opdyck,^ and other persons, 
with their wives, spending — so we are told — a very agree- 
able evening together. How this gathering was put to flight 
by the swashbuckler. Captain John Underbill, is told by sev- 
eral of the parties present : " About an hour after supper there 
came in John Onderhil, with his lieutenant Baxter, and 
drummer, to whom the above-named Philip Gerritsen said, 
' Friends, I have invited these persons here, with their wives ; 
I therefore request that you will betake yourselves to another 
room, where you can be furnished witli wine for money.' 
They finally did so, after many words. Having been gone 
a short time, said Onderhil and his company, who had then 
been joined by Thomas Willet, invited some of our company 
to take a drink with them, which was done. George Baxter, 
by Onderhil's orders, came and requested that Opdyke would 
come and join them, — which he refused. Thereupon he, On- 
derhil and his companions broke into pieces, with drawn swords, 
the cans which hung on the shelf in the tavern ; endeavoring 
by force, having drawn swords in their hands, to come into 
the room where the invited guests were. This was for a long 

^ Commissary at the Soath or Delaware River settlements, and original 
grantee of Coney Island. 



DOMINIE BOGARDUS'S PARTY 181 

time resisted by the landlady, with a leaden bolt, and by the 
landlord, by keeping the door shut ; but finally John Onder- 
hil and his associates, in spite of all opposition, came into 
the room, where he uttered many words. Captain Onderhil, 
holding his sword in his hand and the scabbard in his left 
hand, — the blade about a foot out of the scabbard, — said to 
the minister, as reported, whilst he grasped his sword : ' Clear 
out of here, for I shall strike at random ! ' In like manner, 
some English soldiers came immediately (as we presume, to 
his assistance), the above named Onderhil being then guilty, 
with his companions, of gross insolence." The uproar now 
assumed larger proportions, and the fiscal, or public prose- 
cutor, and a guard from the fort were sent for, without their 
presence producing much effect on the drunken Englishmen. 
The latter still refused to withdraw from the scene of festiv- 
ity; and it was presumably in reply to an admonition of 
Dominie Bogardus, coupled with a suggestion of sending for 
the Director-General himself, that Underbill said to the 
Minister, as deposed to by the witnesses : " If the Director 
come here, 'tis well. I had rather speak to a wise man than 
a fool." This irreverent reply seems to have taken all the 
spirit from the guests. "And in order to prevent further 
and more serious mischief, — yea, even bloodshed," say the 
witnesses, lugubriously, " we broke up our pleasant party be- 
fore we had intended." 

Indeed, the affrays at the City Tavern were not always 
devoid of bloodshed. In 1647, one Simon Root picked a 
quarrel and fought here with Pieter Ebel, the jailer, in which 
the former had the misfortune to have " a piece of his ear " 
cut off by a cutlass in the jailer's hand. Root made a formal 
application to the Director and Council for a certificate of 
this fact, which was granted to him, — presumably for the 
purpose of showing that the injured member had not been 
" cropped " to satisfy the demands of justice. 

The "Great Tavern," some time before it became the Town 
Hall of New Amsterdam, had come to be the seat of a good 
deal of business of a public nature. As early as 1647, it 



182 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

was one of the three places in which all public notices were 
posted, the others being the fort, and the barn of the West 
India Company. Here, too, for a number of years, the Direc- 
tor and Council seem to have frequently sat as a court for 
the trial of the minor cases coming before them. These men 
were often not exactly legal Solons, and the cases which came 
before them were not infrequently of the most trivial de- 
scription, for they had to deal with the childish squabbles of 
sailors, soldiers, and rude and ignorant men and women from 
half the countries of Europe, for the latter class was not rare 
among the colonists. The fact that such quarrels had to be 
adjudicated before the highest legal tribunal of the colony, 
frequently lends a humorous character to the proceedings, of 
which the members of the court often seem to be aware and 
which shows itself in their decisions far more than does 
that ponderous gravity upon which various wi'iters have been 
so fond of expatiating. The great Shirt Case, which occupied 
the attention of the Director and his Council, in August, 1646, 
may serve as an illustration of what has just been said. In 
that case, one Claes Pietersen, a sailor, proceeded by attach- 
ment process to recover two shirts, in the possession of an- 
other sailor, Jan Jansen from Hoorn. Upon the hearing, the 
defendant Jansen protested, rather guardedly, that the shirts 
resembled some he had bought in Holland. The court de- 
cided that as they had never discovered any fault in the plaintiff 
Pietersen, the possession of the shirts should be given to him, 
and that if the defendant could not prove that the shirts be- 
longed to him, he should remain silent. The defendant Jan- 
sen, not being satisfied with this disposition of the case, then 
commenced a suit against Pietersen, somewhat in the nature 
of an equitable bill of discovery, to compel him to disclose 
where he got the shirts. Pietersen's answer to this was that 
he purchased the shirts at Amsterdam, but was unable to say 
in what street. The equities of this important matter having 
been duly weighed by the Council, that body decided that 
"they find not a particle of guilt in the defendant; where- 
fore the plaintiff is commanded to keep silent, on condition 



Ed a 







o o g 



MEETING OF DELEGATES 183 

that the defendant^ when he goes to Holland, and shall have 
arrived at Amsterdam, remairis bound to point out the shop 
where he bought the shirtsJ" 

Matters of a more important nature sometimes occupied 
the attention of the Director and Council. Here, in the fall 
and winter of 1653, was held a meeting of delegates from 
the Dutch and English villages around New Amsterdam,^ 
for the purpose of devising some plan of common defence 
against threatened Indian attacks, the West India Company 
faiUng to provide adequate protection. The English dele- 
gates had additional grievances which they proceeded to air 
at this meeting, under the form of a "remonstrance," both 
to the Director and Council and to the States-General of 
the Netherlands : — they were not as well treated as they ex- 
pected to be when they came to settle under the rule of the 
New Netherland authorities ; moreover, discriminations were 
made against them and in favor of the Dutch. These men, 
some of whom — as the Middelburg or Newtown delegates — 
had not yet been in the country much over a year, calmly 
proceeded to inform the Director-General that " instead of 
liberty, an arbitrary government is rearing its head among 
them, and laws affecting the lives and property of the com- 
monalty are enacted without the knowledge or approbation 
of the latter." The unquestionable truth of these assertions 
only made them the less palatable to Stuyvesant, and had 
his path been clear, he would undoubtedly have terminated 
the proceedings of the Convention at the City Tavern in 
short order. Just about this time, however, the Dutch and 
English fleets, under Van Tromp and Blake, had been pound- 
ing each other to pieces in the English Channel, in the course 
of the war growing out of the Navigation Act, — with con- 
siderable disadvantage to the Dutch. It was impossible to 
tell what the English in the New England colonies might 
take it into their heads to do ; the Director-General therefore 
restrained himself so far as to send a written communication 

1 Two sessions were held, one beginning on the 25th of November, and the 
other on the 10th of December, 1653. 



184 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

to the convention, in which, after reminding the delegates that 
they were an illegal body, with whose doings he was not at 
all obliged to concern himself, he proceeded to examine and 
to deny their statements, merely referring to the English as 
the "instigators and leaders of these novelties." 

The same cause which had induced the Director-General 
to demean himself with unwonted moderation towards the 
delegates led the latter to assume a lofty tone. The English 
delegates from Heemstede, Rusdorp, Vlissingen, and Middel- 
burg 1 (whose constituents, all told, probably did not amount 
to a thousand men, women, and children), already saw, in 
their mind's eye, the fleets and armies of Cromwell advancing 
on New Amsterdam ; they immediately again demanded the 
redress of their grievances, and notified Stuyvesant that in 
case of refusal they would appeal to his superiors at Amster- 
dam. This was too much: the persecutor of Melyn and of 
Kuyter never could bear to hear talk of an appeal from his 
decisions ; he flew into a rage, and dispersed the convention 
so quickly that the delegates hardly had time to pay their 
tavern bills. True to their word, the delegates sent their 
" remonstrance " to the Amsterdam Chamber of the West 
India Company, but it was rejected by that body with scant 
courtesy. 

A municipal government, modelled to a certain extent 
upon that of the towns of the Netherlands, having been 
granted to New Amsterdam by the West India Company, 
in answer to long-continued requests from the citizens, the 
new form of administration, imder a schout, or sheriff, two 
burgomasters, or superior magistrates, and five schepens, or 
councillors, took effect at the beginning of the year 1653; 
and the City Tavern was appointed as the place in which 
the new municipal body should hold its sessions, both ad- 
ministrative and judicial, for in addition to the ordinary 
business of town or city government, the burgomasters and 
schepens also formed a court of lunited jurisdiction in both 
civil and criminal matters. It soon became evident, how- 
1 The later Hempstead, Jamaica, Flushing, and Newtown. 



CITY TAVERN BECOMES THE TOWN HALL 185 

ever, that it was highly desirable, for various reasons, that 
the municipality should have entire control of the building in 
which its business was carried on. The West India Com- 
pany, in the embarrassed state of its affairs, had never cleared 
away its debts for the construction of the City Tavern ; and 
upon the 24th of December, 1653, the burgomasters and 
schepens sent a petition to the Company at Amsterdam, 
asking for a grant to them of the building, offering on their 
part to pay the debts which remained due upon the same. 
This petition was favorably entertained by the Amsterdam 
Chamber of the Company, which, on the 18th of May, 1654, 
granted the City Tavern " to the use of the Regents for the 
time being, and for their business, but no one shall claim from 
this any right to it individually, or to alienate or mortgage it 
collectively." ^ 

The City Tavern, accordingly, became known henceforth 
as the Stadt Huys, or Town Hall, and several important 
changes soon took place around it. The building appears to 
have stood originally upon the lower part of the slope of a 
knoll of moderate elevation rising to the east of it, in such 
a manner that while the eastern portion of its basement was 
below, the western portion was above the surface of the 
ground, and in this latter, facing the fort and the town, was 
the entrance, or one of the entrances to the tavern. Soon 
after the municipality acquired this building, fears began to 
be entertained that the bank or open space between it and 
the river might be seriously encroached upon by the waves. 
It was decided therefore to fill out and to grade between the 
Town House and the water's edge, and to protect this im- 
provement from the tides by constructing a sheet-piling of 
planks in front of it. In pursuance of this design, Charles 
Bridges (or, as the Dutch called him, Van Brugge), who 
held, in right of his wife, Sarah, the ground occupied by the 
knoll above mentioned, lying east of the Town Hall, was 

1 The fee simple of this property, which was afterwards granted by the city, 
came to it, of course, through the coufiscation of the property of the West India 
Company by the English after the surrender, in 1664. 



186 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

notified, in April, 1656, by the court messenger, " for the 
good of this town, to let him take, without any hindrance, 
from the hill before his lot, as much earth as shall be re- 
quired for filling in before the Town Hall." 

The ground now covered by Pearl Street and a part of 
Coenties Slip having been thus filled out and levelled, the 
main entrance to the hall was made on the side towards the 
river, and a small cupola for a bell having been placed upon 
it, the building assumed the form in which it has been 
presented to us by the sketch of the Labadist missionaries, 
Danker and Sluyter, upon their visit to New York in 1679- 
80, — probably the only reliable representation in existence 
of this building as it was in its later days.^ 

Whether the Town Hall continued to be used for tavern 
purposes, after its acquisition by the burgomasters, is not 
clear. On the one hand, the business of the municipality 
could have required but a small portion of the building, and 
it was certainly used for festive purposes ; upon the con- 
templated absence from New Amsterdam of Director-General 
Stuyvesant, in the winter of 1654-55, the burgomasters make 
the following entry in their minutes, under date of Saturday 
afternoon, December 12, 1654 : " that, as the Right Honorable 
intends to depart, the burgomasters and schepens shall com- 
pliment him before he take his gallant voyage, and for this 
purpose shall provide a gay repast on next Wednesday noon 
at the Town Hall, in the Council Chamber. Wherefore a list 
of what was required was made out, and what was considered 
necessary was ordered." 

1 The view of the Stadt Hays, given by Mr. D. T. Valentine, in his History of 
New York, and also in the Manuals of the Common Council (which view has 
generally been inserted in the works of later writers), besides being architectur- 
ally impossible, with its leaning or " drunken " stepped gables, is also inaccurate 
in several other respects. As for the appearance of this building in one of Mr. 
V.'s imaginary sketches, purporting to be a view of the vicinity in 1658 (Man. 
Com. Counc, for 1862, p. 529), the slight mistakes are made of placing the hill 
along the shore to the west, instead of to the east, of the Town Hall, and in crown- 
ing that edifice with a capola, some ten or fifteen years before it was placed 
there. 



STADT HUYS WANTED FOR A SCHOOL 187 

On the other hand, however, the space in and about the 
Town House was frequently made use of in such a way as 
to seem incompatible with the emplojonent of any part of the 
building for tavern purposes. In 1655, the structure is stated 
to be encumbered with a large quantity of salt, placed there 
on storage, and certain lodgers had also got possession of 
different parts of it, or of its outbuildings, — one of these, in 
particular, was a person who, having had the misfortune to 
lose his own house by fire, had taken up his quarters here, 
*' in the little sail loft." At this time the burgomasters ordered 
the premises to be cleared. In the same manner, in 1660, it 
was found that the yard or enclosure of the Town House was 
being used for the storage of lumber, brick, etc., and it was 
ordered that a gate should be made in the rear, and that the 
jailer should see that the trespasses were discontinued. 

Whether any portion of this building was used for school 
purposes, as has been claimed, is doubtful. On the 4th of 
April, 1652, the Chamber of Directors of the West India 
Company at Amsterdam gave the appointment of school- 
master at New Amsterdam to Jan la Montagne, and he was 
permitted to use the City Tavern, " if practicable." Some 
time must have elapsed, however, before such an arrangement 
could have gone into effect, and in the beginning of the suc- 
ceeding year the City Tavern was appropriated to the use of 
the burgomasters, as already shown. The writer has not been 
able to find any evidence that the building was used for school 
purposes, under the regime of the burgomasters : on the con- 
trary, in November, 1656, Harmanus van Hoboken, then 
schoolmaster, petitions those magistrates " to grant him the 
hall and side room for the use of the school, and as a dwell- 
ing, inasmuch as he, the petitioner, does not know how to 
manage for the proper accommodation of the children during 
winter, for they much require a place adapted for fire, and to 
be warmed, for which their present tenement is wholly vmfit." 
The schoolmaster then goes on to sliow that he has a wife 
and children, and is in straits to find accommodation for them, 
and he asks that if the burgomasters cannot grant him the 



188 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

rooms requested, they will allow him the rent of the back 
room of a certain house, then occupied by one Geurt Coerten. 
To this petition, the burgomasters answer that " the hall and 
little room are not in repair, and are, moreover, wanted for 
other purposes. He (petitioner) is allowed to rent said 
house, for wliich one hundred guilders shall be paid him 
yearly." 

Here, then, in the Stadt Huys of New Amsterdam, the 
worthy merchants and brewers, Indian traders and ship cap- 
tains, who usually composed the body of burgomasters and 
schepens of the little municipality, met and passed their ordi- 
nances for the government of the town, or sat as a court of 
justice to consider the numerous and sometimes queer con- 
troversies which were brought before them. Naturally, they 
were not men who were overstocked with legal lore. Pon- 
derous folios and quartos, in hog-skin, of the civil and im- 
perial laws, of the ordinances of the States-General and of the 
States of Holland, and the well-thumbed " Roseboom's Re- 
cueil " of the Statutes and Customs of Amsterdam, lay before 
the magistrates, inviting them to lose themselves in the mazes 
of those abstruse treatises ; they preferred, however, as a rule, 
to render their decisions by the aid of what is sometimes 
known as " horse sense." They were fond of setthng cases 
informally by inducing parties to accept their advice before 
going to trial : failing this, they were apt to send the cases 
for arbitration to one or two " good men," whom they would 
select out of the community, with instructions to reconcile 
the contending parties, if possible ; in one case, in the year 
1662, where a question of the sewing of linen caps was in- 
volved, the court went so far as to appoint certain " good 
women " as arbitrators. 

As to the portion of the Stadt Huys building used for the 
sessions of the court, Mr. D. T. Valentine has found some 
evidence, apparently, that it was the eastern side of the 
second story, — for he asserts this to have been the fact. In 
1670, however. Governor Francis Lovelace, who had acquired a 
plot of ground immediately adjoining the Stadt Huys, upon the 



GOVERNOR LOVELACE'S TAVERN 189 

west, commenced the erection of "an inn, or ordinary " upon the 
plot, and sent a communication to the magistrates in the early- 
part of that year to know whether they would allow him " to 
build the upper part of the house something over the passage 
of the town which lieth between the State House and the 
lott, and to make a doore to go from the upper part of the 
house into the Court's Chambers," This proposition — which 
was agreed to by the magistrates, leaving it to the governor's 
discretion to pay what was thought fit for " the vacant strooke 
of ground " lying between the buildings, and moreover " not 
to cut off the entrance into the prison doore, or common 
gaol " — would seem to indicate that the court-room was 
upon the western side of the second floor, in 1670, at any rate. 
The term " chambers " used in the communication is hardly 
likely to have referred to private rooms of the magistrates, as 
tavern connection, though possibly very convenient in some 
cases, might have led to pubHc scandal against those high 
officials. The tavern of Governor Lovelace, above referred 
to, is shown upon the Danker and Sluyter view of 1679. 

The Stadt Huys grounds were infringed upon, not only by 
the grant to Governor Lovelace, but by several other grants, 
made from time to time. During the years 1664 to 1666, the 
entire front along Duke Street, as it was then called, or the 
present Stone Street, was granted in very small lots to va- 
rious individuals, and only an alley or passageway to the rear 
of the hall was retained : tliis passageway opened upon Stone 
Street just about where the doorway of the present building 
No. 40 Stone Street now is. Towards the close of the seven- 
teenth century, the hall building began to show signs of dilapi- 
dation, to such an extent that, although it had only been 
standing a little more than fifty years, it gradually came to 
be considered unsafe. In 1696, the subject of erecting a new 
City Hall was under discussion ; in 1698, the ground for the 
new building was selected, at the northeast corner of Wall 
and the present Nassau streets, and finally, in August, 1699, 
the historic building and its site were sold at public auction. 

Within the walls of tliis edifice, or, in fine weather, upon 



190 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

the open space between it and the river, the citizens of New 
Amsterdam were wont to gather and to discuss matters of pub- 
lic and of private interest, as well as the news of the day, 
through more than half a century of a period to which are 
usually ascribed some of the most interesting occurrences of 
modern times. Here, as tidings from across the ocean tardily 
came to be known, men talked of the destruction of the mon- 
archy in England and of the new commonwealth there; of 
the latter days of tlie Thirty Years' War ; of Louis XIV, and 
of the French power, threatening all Europe; of the great 
naval wars between England and the Netherlands for the 
supremacy of the seas ; of the Turkish hordes before Vienna, 
and of their flight before John Sobieski ; of the wonderful 
revolutions which placed William of Orange upon the throne 
of England and at the front of European politics. The names 
of Cromwell and of Richelieu, of Mazarin and of Colbert ; of 
the murdered King Charles, and of the fugitive King James ; 
of great admirals and generals, Van Tromp and De Ruyter, 
Turenne and Luxembourg, — were once familiar sounds in 
this locality.^ Now, all is changed: crowded warehouses 
cover the land far out into what was the river of those 
days ; and in front of the spot where were the windows of 
the court-room in which Leisler and Milborne were con- 
demned to suffer death for treason, the trains of the elevated 
railway sweep round into Coenties Slip. 

The site of the beginnings of its municipal government 
would have been carefully preserved, or at any rate honored 
with a substantial monument, by almost any small town of 
New England, but in the City of New York it has not been 
thought necessary to mark the site of the Stadt Huys by 
anything more than a small bronze plate placed high up on 

1 Council Minutes, 6 July, 1672. " Tuesday next, about 10 or 11 of ye clock 
before noon is appointed to make proclamation of the Warre," at the State 
House. This was the war by England and France against the United Provinces, 
in which war New York was captured by the Dutch in the following year, and in 
which William III. the young Prince of Orange, newly appointed Commander-in- 
chief of the forces of the Netherlands, displayed his abilities under very trying 
circumstances. 



SITE OF THE STADT HUYS 191 

the front of the modern building standing at this point ; the 
inscription upon this plate may doubtless be read from the 
street by any person provided with a good opera-glass. 
The corporation which has so much of the tax-payers' money 
to spend for all sorts of necessary and of unnecessary objects 
has perhaps spent a good deal of it to worse advantage than 
if it had acquired the site of its first home, and thereon built, 
for some of its municipal purposes, a building designed to 
reproduce as far as possible the historic structure. 

The site of the Stadt Huys is at present occupied by a 
common warehouse, tall and dismal, and by a liquor saloon 
which may represent a continuous flow of the tap at this spot, 
from the days of the Great Tavern and of Governor Love- 
lace's "ordinary." 



CHAPTER XVI 

THE "ENGLISH QUARTER," AND THE GRANTS TO THOMAS 
WILLET AND TO RICHARD SMITH.— WILLIAM PATER- 
SON, THE SCOTCHMAN, AND HIS ADVENTURES.— WHO 
WAS HE? — AN HISTORICAL PROBLEM 

THE present block of ground lying between Stone and 
Pearl streets, Coenties Alley and Hanover Square, 
which constituted, in the seventeenth century, the small 
tract situated east of the Stadt Huys and between Hoogh 
Straet and the river shore, became, at an early day, a sort of 
English quarter in the town. Here, in 1645, Thomas Willet 
received a grant of the land lying "next to the Great 
Tavern," a parcel of irregular shape, averaging about one 
hundred and seventy-five feet in width, and extending from 
the road, or Hoogh Straet, to the river, — a distance of 
something over one hundred feet. This parcel seems to 
have formed a hill, or bluff of .moderate height, which was 
levelled — in part, at any rate ■ — about the year 1656, for 
the purpose of filling out and grading the open space along 
the shore which formed what is now Pearl Street in this 
vicinity, of which proceeding some notice has already been 
taken. 1 Who this Thomas Willet, the original grantee, was, 
has not been very clearly ascertained. He has been con- 
stantly confounded by various writers with Captain Thomas 
Willet of Plymouth Colony, who afterwards engaged in trade 
between New Amsterdam and the New England towns, and 
who, after the surrender to the English in 1664, was ap- 
pointed the first mayor of the City of New York. That he 
was of kin to Captain Thomas Willet is not at all improbable ; 
but examination fails to disclose the nature of the connection, 

1 See ante, page 183. 




COKNTIES AlLKY. 

Looking towards Stone Street. Tlie ancient Stadt Hiiys Lane, 
witli part of tiie site of the Stadt Huvs. 



I 



THOMAS WILLET 193 

if any existed. About all that seems to be known of the 
antecedents of Thomas Willet of New Amsterdam is that in 
his marriage record in the Dutch Church he is described as 
being from Bristol, in England. 

Thomas Willet, the grantee of the Hoogli Straet land, 
appears in 1643 — then being a young man of twenty-two 
years of age — as one of the English soldiers in the employ 
of the West India Company. As such, he was one of those 
who took part in the -massacre of the Indians, by Director 
Kieft's orders, on the night of February 25, 1643, at Pa- 
vonia; and upon the next day he was one of the witnesses of 
the killing of the Dutchman, Dirck Straetmaker, and his wife, 
who in spite of warnings to the contrary had insisted on visit- 
ing the scene of the horrid butchery of the preceding night, 
where the bodies of the slain were still lying; he and his 
wife were there murdered by some of the enraged Indians 
who had already begun to gather in the vicinity, — the 
Dutch soldiers being too far away to afford relief. 

It was in the fall of this same year, 1643, that Thomas 
Willet married an English girl, Sarah, the daughter of 
Thomas Cornell. The latter, with his family, had emigrated 
to America several years before, from the shire of Essex in 
England, and had acquired from the Indians a tract lying 
just east of the Bronx River; here he established a planta- 
tion, which with those of his neighbors, Jonas Bronck and 
Edward Jessup, formed the outposts of civilization in the 
vicinity of New Amsterdam along the East River; Thomas 
Cornell's tract soon took the name of Cornell's Neck, and 
his farmhouse was situated nearly two miles southeast of the 
present village of West Farms. 

After his marriage to Sarah Cornell, Thomas Willet ap- 
pears to have remained at New Amsterdam for several years, 
still apparently in the employ of the West India Company. 
His presence, with his captain. Underbill, at the time of the 
drunken onslaught of the latter on Dominie Bogardus's party 
at the City Tavern, in 1644, has already been spoken of.^ 

1 See an/e, page 180. 
13 



194 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

Although his ground-brief for the land on Hoogh Straet was 
only obtained in 1645, there is evidence that he had built 
upon the plot before that time, his house occupying very 
nearly the site of the present building, No. 48 Stone Street, 
— now an old tea and coffee warehouse. In the summer or 
autumn of 1645, he appears to have been engaged in a joint 
mercantile speculation with the skipper Juriaen Blanck and 
Doctor Kiersted's brother Jocliem, in relation to which the 
partners had a disagreement which brought them into court. 
After this we have no further notices of Thomas Willet; he 
must, however, have died within a year or so from the last- 
mentioned date, for in November, 1647, his widow Sarah 
married Charles Bridges, of Canterbury. 

At the mention of Canterbury, thoughts of the old city 
of the monk St. Augustine and of Thomas k Becket will 
occur to many, — wliere the majestic cathedral, the mother- 
church of England, still looks down (or recently did, for 
some serious inroads have been made by modern innovations) 
on massive city walls and gates, upon quaint streets lined with 
overhanging houses, and upon the Stour, placidly flowing by 
the city and through hop fields and meadows, orchards and 
gardens, — much as it all was in Charles Bridges' time ; for 
Canterbury is one of those eddies, lying outside the main cur- 
rent of time, where all things slowly revolve in a limited circle, 
while the greater flow sweeps by with its perpetual change. 

Causes of which we are ignorant transferred Charles 
Bridges from the ancient capital of the Kent-men to the 
Dutch island of Curagoa, in the West Indies, prior to 1639, 
in which year we find him making a voyage to New Amster- 
dam as supercargo of the ship "White Raven." Bridges 
early became a thoroughly Teutonized Englishman, and was 
not only called by the Dutch, but called himself, by the 
Dutch equivalent of his name, Carel van Brugge. He rose 
into prominence in the Dutch island, and in 1644 was ap- 
pointed member of the Council and keeper of the stores at 
that place. He seems to have been somewhat of a favorite 
with Director Stuyvesant, and when the latter was trans- 



CHARLES BRIDGES 195 

ferred from Curagoa to New Amsterdam, in the early part 
of 1647, Bridges, or Van Brugge, accompanied him from the 
West Indies, and upon reaching New Netherland, he received 
the appointment of commissary at Fort Orange, or Albany, 
where he appears to have taken the place of the unfortunate 
surgeon, Harmanus van der Bogaerdt.^ As he was married 
just about this period to the widow Willet, it may be presumed 
that he resided at Fort Orange for some time, as we hear 
nothing further of him till 1651, when he was again in New 
Amsterdam, holding the office of commissary of provincial 
accounts, and in 1652 he was made Provincial Secretary. 
For many years. Bridges and his family, including his young 
step-sons, William and Thomas Willet, resided part of the 
time in the house on Hoogh S tract, which had belonged to 
Mrs. Bridges' first husband, or in Vlissingen, now Flushing 
upon Long Island, where Bridges early acquired interests. 
After the surrender of New Netherland to the English, 
in 1664, Charles Bridges, or Van Brugge, says Doctor 
O'Calhighan, "resumed his English name, appearing under 
it as one of the patentees of Flushing. With the return of 
the Dutch in 1673, he became again Carel van Brugge and 
was appointed clerk of the English towns upon Long Island, 
residing at Flushing, where he died, August, 1682." His 
wife Sarah, who survived him, married for her third husband 
John Lawrence, Jr., of Flushing; and some time prior to 
1686, the property on Hoogh Straet was divided between 
Lawrence and Thomas Willet, son of the original grantee, 
Lawrence retaining the house and the eastern half of the plot 
of ground. 

At the time of this partition, however, Thomas Willet's 
patrimony had been reduced in size by the sale of two small 
parcels from it many years before, by Charles Bridges and 
his wife, as it would seem. Of these parcels, one was a lot 
adjoining the Stadt Huys Lane, which came into the pos- 
session of George Woolsey, probably soon after the period of 
our survey. Woolsey was, it is believed, a native of the 

^ See ante, page 70. 



196 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

ancient fishing town of Yarmouth, in the County of Norfolk, 
on the east coast of England, and as early as 16-16 was the 
clerk or manager of Isaac Allerton, the active trader through 
whose hands passed most of the trade between New Amster- 
dam and the New England settlements, and whose warehouse 
stood upon the shore of the East River near the southwest 
corner of the present Pearl Street and Peck Slip. In 
December, 1647, about a month after the marriage of Charles 
Bridges, we find the marriage of George Woolsey to Rebecca 
Cornell, who was in all probability a sister of Mrs. Bridges. 
Just when Woolsey acquired this lot at the Stadt Huys Lane 
we are ignorant, as we are also of the time at which he built 
upon it; it was undoubtedly not until after the grading of 
the hill at this point, in 1656, in order to fill out in front of 
the Town Hall, as already mentioned; perhaps it was not 
until after 1659, when his employer, Isaac Allerton, died, and 
the business passed into other hands. Be this as it may, we 
find George Woolsey residing here for several years, until in 
1668 he sold the premises to William Paterson. The dingy 
brick building which now occupies this site — a bagging and 
cooperage warehouse. No. 75 Pearl Street, the entrance to 
which stands in the perpetual twilight of the elevated rail- 
way structure above — is dull and commonplace enough to 
afford some ground for an impression that no associations of 
interest could possibly have marked the spot ; yet here was 
apparently the residence for a time of a singular character, 
whose history, if fully known, might throw a great deal of 
light upon one of the historical mysteries of the seventeenth 
century, which has hitherto baffled many determined investi- 
gators. The matter seems to be of sufficient interest and 
importance to justify a digression from the plan of our 
survey. 

William Paterson, to whom George Woolsey sold his 
house near the Town Hall, was a Scotchman who appeared 
in New York in or about the year 1668. He called himself 
a merchant, or trader, but his trading consisted principally, 
so far as we are informed, in the importation of liquor — 



WILLIAM PATERSON'S HOUSES 197 

mainly rum, of course — from the West Indies. One cir- 
cumstance attending Paterson's coming to New York cannot 
fail to arrest our attention ; while most of the new traders, 
both Dutch and English, who had come to the small town, 
had engaged in business here cautiously, usually hiring a 
house until they were well established, and at most only pur- 
chasing a location for their store or warehouse, Paterson, 
within a very short time after his arrival, acquired possession 
of no less than six different pieces of property, four of which 
already contained houses upon them, while upon another of 
his lots he himself seems to have had a building erected soon 
after his purchase.^ 

Of Paterson's life at New York we know but little; he 
appears to have possessed a keen sense of injustice, coupled 
with a quick temper, and this soon brought him into trouble 
there. In the earl}"- part of the spring of 1669, Paterson had 
brought a suit upon an account and other matters against 
one John Garland, and had recovered judgment. He was 
now endeavoring to obtain either the collection of his debt or 
security for the same from Garland ; when another suit was 
brought against the latter by Isaac Bedlo, before the mayor 
and aldermen in the municipal court. Bedlo, being himself 
an alderman at the time, was of course a member of the 
court. This cause came on at the City Hall upon the 16th 
of March, 1669; no opposition was made by Garland, and 

1 These parcels acquired by Paterson were as follows : — 

I. The house and lot above mentioned as having been purchased of George 
Woolsey, at the corner of the present Coenties Alley and Pearl Street. 

II. A small house and lot on the east side of the present William Street, near 
Wall. 

III. A house with nearly half an acre of ground lying upon an interior lane or 
passageway at one time called Smith's Street, but afterwards closed, a frontage 
having been obtained upon the later Smith's now William Street. 

IV. A house and lot on the south side of Pearl Street between the fort and 
the river. 

V. A small parcel of ground forming the portion lying towards Stone Street 
of the building known at present as the Old Cotton Exchange, fronting Han- 
over Square. 

VI. A small lot of vacant ground at the southeast corner of the present Wall 
and William streets. 



198 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

judgment was ordered against him upon the spot, for 3,727 
florins' wampum, and an execution was ordered to be issued 
immediately. Paterson, who was present in the court, de- 
nounced this proceeding indignantly; it was only he said, 
" in color to deceive him and to prevent him from collecting 
his debt from Garland;" furthermore, the court was in no 
condition to pass any judgment, because, excluding Alderman 
Bedlo, the prescribed number of members was not complete. 
As a matter of fact, the court was composed entirely of old 
Dutch residents, and consisted, besides Cornells van Steen- 
wyck, the maj^or, of Alderman Bedlo, Franrois Boon, and 
Christopher Hooghlandt. In a matter taking the form of an 
issue between one of their own members and a stranger Scotch- 
man, the action of the court was not likely to be materially 
different from that of more highly organized tribunals in 
similar cases, and we find that Paterson's protest not only 
received but scant consideration, but that, to complete the 
rather suspicious appearance of the case. Garland's attorney, 
who was present, rose and stated to the court that his client 
"found himself very much aggrieved by said judgments, and 
asked for an arrest " (that is, stay of proceedings) " till the 
return of his Honor the Governor, that he might petition for 
an appeal in said causes; " this the complaisant court allowed 
him at once. 

Paterson does not appear to have become speedily recon- 
ciled to the proceedings of the Solons of the Mayor's Court 
in his case. He transferred a portion of his wrath to the 
Marshal of the Court, who held the executions against Gar- 
land ; and in a few days we find that officer, Henry Newton, 
bringing "an action of Disfamation " against Paterson. In 
this he declares ^ that the Scotchman " hath greatly disfamed 
this plaintiff in doing his office as Marishal of this citty, m 
calling this plaintiff Roag, & would proeve him to be one 
before the Govern^" The indignant court upon this occa- 
sion imposed upon Paterson for the insult to their officer a 
fine of 25 guilders, "and recommend him to take warning 

1 On the 6th of April, 1669. 



AFFAIR OF CAPTAIN BAKER 199 

not to affront or abuse any of the officers for the future any 
more, or that a greater penalty shal be imposed upon him 
according to the merits thereof." 

Greatly irritated, no doubt, by these proceedings, Paterson 
seems soon to have departed from New York upon what 
appears to have been a trading or mercantile expedition to 
Albany; there he speedily fell into a worse difficulty than 
his previous one, and became the central figure in an affair 
which was the great topic of the day throughout the Colony, 
and which threatened for a time to bring about very serious 
difficulties between the Dutch colonists and their English 
rulers. 

The captain of the English garrison at Albany at this time 
was one John Baker. If, as has been asserted, all the 
varieties of human character have been portrayed in the 
writings of Shakespeare, it is quite manifest that this man's 
type is to be found in Ancient Pistol. He was a swash- 
buckler of the first magnitude. Just what excited Captain 
Baker's ire against William Paterson at Albany we do not 
know, but to all appearance it was jealousy. Paterson, as it 
would seem, had, upon coming to Albany, hired a small 
house of Jochem Wessells, a baker by occupation, but who 
was at this time engaged in trading with the Indians. There 
is some evidence that this Jochem was the son of Paterson's 
near neighbor in New York, the old fisherman Wessell 
Evertsen ; the sites of his house, and of that occupied by 
Paterson, were near the north gate of Albany, along the 
river shore, in a place upon which are situated at the present 
day some very dismal old houses, just north of the depot-yard 
of the New York Central Railway. The house hired of 
Jochem Wessells was tenanted by Paterson and his servant- 
man, who seem to have taken their meals at the house of 
Paterson's landlord. It was at the bench in front of the 
latter house, where Paterson sat on the evening of July 31, 
1669, smoking a pipe after supper and conversing with 
Gertruyd, Jochem Wessells' wife, when Captain Baker, 
coming from a neighboring tavern, walked up to Paterson 



200 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

and accosted him with a very foul imputation and insult. 
Paterson replied in a suitable manner and with cool temper, 
but Captain Baker, whose evident intention was, as Paterson 
states, "to pike a quarrel," after threatening to cut off 
Paterson's ears, etc., struck him in the face. Paterson 
hereupon stepped back into the doorway and warned his 
adversary against repeating the act, while Jochem's wife 
endeavored to separate the two men, but Baker again struck 
Paterson, and this time succeeded in bringing the Scotch 
blood into full play. Paterson sprang at his enemy, grasped 
him around the body, hurled him to the ground, and thrashed 
him at his pleasure, till the bystanders interfered in compas- 
sion on the unlucky captain. Baker, beside himself with 
rage, now repaired to the fort, where he ordered out a small 
detachment of his men, with whom he returned to the scene 
of battle. Finding the door of Jochem Wessells' house 
fastened, Baker ordered his men to burst it open, but the 
whole business was so manifestly lawless that the soldiers 
refused to obey his orders, whereupon the captain burst open 
the door himself with the butt of a musket. Not finding 
Paterson here, he having retired to his own house, the cap- 
tain contented himself with striking and abusing Jochem 
Wessells' wife, whom he ordered to be put under arrest; 
after which, in Paterson's words, "he came running with his 
said guard to the house and lodging of this complainant, and 
without knoking or warning of this complainant that he 
would be in the house, he charged his said guard to break 
open the door of the complainants house . . . which they 
likewise refused to do; and this complainant, hearing the 
noise, being just ready to go abed, called out to them and 
said, ' Stay, Captain Baker, I will open the door. ' But the 
said Baker replied, ' No, but I will break it open, ' which he 
likewise did, . . . which being done, he came in with his 
sword drawn and pointed at this complainant with intent to 
have killed him, which he likewise would have done, in case 
it was not hindered by the Providence of God." ^ 

^ The form of this providential hindrance is shown by the testimony of a 
witness, one Lambert Aelberts van Neck, a Dutch merchant from New York, 



ARREST OF PATERSON 201 

Paterson was now taken as a prisoner to the fort by 
Captain Baker, but tliat son of Mars in his blind fury had 
unwittingly stirred up an enemy against himself likely to 
give him much more trouble than did the bruises inflicted 
upon him by William Paterson; this was the Dutch com- 
munity of Albany; the rights of criminal and of civil juris- 
diction secured to their courts by the articles of surrender to 
the English had been so grossly violated by this exploit of 
Baker, that though the Dutch probably had but little personal 
interest in the stranger, William Paterson, yet as a matter of 
principle they took up his cause at once, and as one man. 
Late as it was on the night of the 31st of July, the magis- 
trates were convened, and proceeded in a body to the fort, 
where they demanded Paterson's release. This was refused 
by Baker at first, but within twenty-four hours he began to 
see the danger of his position, and assented to Paterson's 
discharge. 

In the mean time the Dutch magistrates permitted no 
delay. Though the next day was Sunday, the 1st of August, 
they held an extraordinary session in the afternoon, at which 
Paterson was present, and at which papers were prepared 
for transmission to the Governor and Council at New York. 
These were probably presented in person by Paterson, and 
they were quickly acted upon by the Governor, as the act 
with which Baker was charged was of a nature to stir up 
strife and sedition. Baker was consequently ordered to 
answer the charges at once, and he did so in a curious docu- 
ment, in which with the usual impudence of his kind he 
states that merely on account of his having spoken "in a 
familiar jesting manner " to Paterson he was made the victim 
of a most atrocious assault by that individual, " for in a very 
outrageous manner, he flew upon this defendant with so fierce 

who was among the crowd attracted to the spot by the uproar. He says that 
Paterson offered to open the door, " but before he came the door lay prostrate 
at his feet. Then Captain Baker said, ' Here, you Scotch dog, you must come 
along ; ' and violently entering with his sword drawn, Mr. Paterson caught him 
around the body, and Captain Baker tried to run Mr. Paterson through with his 
sword from above." 



202 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

an assault that he beat him to the ground, defendant not in 
the least suspecting that he durst have been so presumptious 
as to have attempted such an action in the street, without 
respect to this defendants (office ?) under yof Hon^" The 
captain furthermore avers that he did not so much care for 
the beating he received personally, " but that he considered 
it done in contempt of Government, " and that he therefore 
considered it his duty to place Paterson under arrest ; " but 
he falsely allegeth that I kept him prisoner for twenty-one 
hours, for after one hour was expired, he stay'd the rest of 
the time for his recreation." He considers Paterson as a 
contentious fellow, who "hath stuffed this, his information, 
with lyes & idle allegacions; and further that he is not 
the first by many that he hath affronted and abused at 
Albany." He hopes that Paterson will now be made a 
severe example of. 

The reading of this precious production appears to have 
completed the disgust of the Governor and Council. An 
order was made upon the 18th of August suspending Captain 
Baker from his command, and allowing Paterson to prose- 
cute him in the civil courts, and ordering the soldiers of his 
guard to give in their depositions. As they all gave in their 
depositions with great promptness against their commander, 
one may infer that he was not a very popular officer. 

On the 26th of August, an attachment or arrest, in the 
sum of £200, was issued against Captain Baker's house and 
effects at Albany, and — strangely enough — upon the night 
of the 28th of August an attempt was made to burn the 
house of William Paterson, in New York. As to this latter 
affair and its cause, we have nothing but surmises ; all that 
we are informed is that upon the 2d of September, the 
culprit, Daniel Dillon, aged sixteen years, for attempting to 
set fire to William Paterson's house " by putting a brand of 
fire under the door of said house," was sentenced "to be 
whipt twelve slashes," to be kept in prison at the pleasure 
of the court, and to be banished from the city "during 
his life." 



PATERSON LEAVES NEW YORK 203 

A special court, composed of several prominent citizens, 
and headed by Cornelis van Steenwyck, the Mayor of New- 
York, had been appointed to try Paterson's cause against 
Captain Baker. : There was evidently a desire in several 
quarters that the matter should not be carried to too rigorous 
conclusions, the offence, in its criminal aspect, including 
technically the capital crime of burglary. Captain Baker had 
humbled himself so far as to write the following document : 

" Mr Paterson : I am contented to submit to the order of ye 
Committee appointed by his honor the Governor Col. Lovelace, to 
determine the difference betweene you and myselfe, and do con- 
fesse what I did at Albany to you was Rashly and unadvisedly 
done, and I am willing to be friends with you & desire yr excuse 
for my Passion, and so do drinck to you." 

Paterson himself seems likewise to have been anxious to 
have this troublesome case disposed of as soon as possible. 
His sojourn at New York and at Albany had been attended 
with several annoying experiences, and at this time he 
appears to have been endeavoring to close up his not very 
profitable " trading " ventures at New York, preparatory to 
returning to Scotland. Upon the 6th of October, 1669, we 
find that the special court or commission appointed to try 
Baker's case, having made a recommendation that the parties 
should come to some agreement, reports that " Mr. Paterson 
flong up his papers and left the case to be decided by the 
committee." They thereupon, having found that Captain 
Baker was in fault, order him to pay to Paterson the sum of 
200 guilders sewant, or about $80 of the present currency, — 
so the case appears to have ended. ^ 

Paterson, at about this time, or in the fall of 1669, quitted 
New York without having disposed of any of his lands and 
houses in that town. How these were managed, ^ or in what 

1 By an order of the Council dated May 14, 1670, Captain Baker was dismissed 
from the service. 

^ Probably by agents, for a number of years afterwards we are informed 
that " Mr. Bayard " — probably Nicholas Bayard — had a letter of attorney from 
Paterson, " in 1669, wheu he went away." In the following year he gave another 
letter of attorney to one William Taylor. 



204 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

condition they were left we do not know, for no further 
entries appear in the records respecting him or his property 
until the capture of New York by the Dutch took place, in 
the year 1673. At that time all of Paterson's property in the 
city was confiscated and granted to various persons by the 
Dutch Governor Colve, on the ground that Paterson, being 
a resident of Scotland, was not protected by the articles of 
surrender. After the restoration of New York to the Eng- 
lish, and about 1675, it would appear that Paterson, through 
an attorney, attempted to recover some compensation for the 
loss of his property, but the records are extremely meagre, 
amounting to little more than a calendar, in which Paterson's 
claim appears two or three times. The occupants of the 
premises were sustained by the court in their possession 
under Governor Colve's grants; but a memorandum was 
made that "in consideration of Mr. Paterson's loosing his 
houses" he should have "for each house a lot of vacant 
ground in some convenient place within this city, to bee laid 
out by the magistrates with the first convenience." No 
action, however, appears to have taken place by the magis- 
trates to carry out this recommendation. 

Paterson appears, however, to have had sufficient influence 
in England to induce the Duke of York to interest himself 
in the affair, for upon the 17th of May, 1676, we find the 
Governor and Council making a minute in their records, 
wherein after reciting that Mr. Paterson's case "having 
been taken into consideration in obedience to His Royal 
Highness' commands," they proceed to state that "such of 
his houses as were disposed of in the time of the warre being 
confirmed to ye Possessors by the Court of Assize, it is not 
knowne how hee can be relieved therein." 

Ten years were now suffered to elapse by Paterson, when, 
in June, 1684, he being then described as a merchant of 
Edinburgh, we find him executing a power of attorney to 
George Lockhart, chirurgeon, a Scotchman residing at the 
time in New York,i authorizing him "to sue for and recover 

1 Lockhart was quite prominently interested in the proprietary grant of 
East Jersey, of which he claimed himself to be a large owner. In 1683, ho 



A HISTORICAL QUESTION 205 

all and sundry houses, plantations, etc., belonging to me in 
New York, Albany and the colonies of New England, or in 
any other parts of America whatsoever, and to sell and 
dispose of the same," etc. Under this power of attorney 
(which was executed at Edinburgh before Watts Marshall 
and J. Barbour, witnesses) several releases were executed 
in the year 1685 by Lockhart, to the former grantees of 
Paterson's property. 

These proceedings terminate Paterson's connection with 
New York, so far as appears from the records, and we are 
now brought to the question of historical significance sug- 
gested in the early portion of the sketch of that individual's 
transactions at New York. The question is this: Was 
William Paterson, trader at New York in the years 1668 and 
1669, the same William Paterson who nearly a quarter of a 
century later, in England, originated the plan for the estab- 
lishment of the Bank of England, and thus laid the founda- 
tion for the whole system of modern finance ? 

About the early life of the man who may be regarded as 
the real founder of the Bank of England, there has hitherto 
been an almost impenetrable veil of obscurity, and it seems to 
have been Paterson's desire to increase, as far as possible, 
the air of mystery which encompassed him. A voluminous 
writer of pamphlets in favor of the varied projects of his 
fertile brain, he chose to issue them anonymously. Vigor- 
ously attacked and denounced by his numerous enemies on 
account of his financial theories, and later by reason of his 
unfortunate Darien scheme, which had like to have set the 
whole island of Britain by the ears, he rarely condescended 
to notice their vilification of himself and their insinuations 
as to his past life. Probably the necessity of reply was not 
very great, for neither Paterson's enemies nor his friends 
seem to have been able, in spite of what must have been the 

made a proposition to the Board of Proprietors of that province, that upon re- 
ceiving the appointment of marshal, with a grant of ten acres in the village of 
Perth, he would at his own expense build a prison and town-house there. (See 
Doc. relating to Colonial History of N. J., i. 430.) 



206 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

most strenuous exertions on their part, to find much that was 
definitely known either against him or in his favor. " Of his 
early life," says Macaulay, "little is known except that he 
was a native of Scotland, and that he had been in the West 
Indies. In what character he had visited the West Indies 
was a matter about which his contemporaries differed. His 
friends said that he had been a missionary; his enemies that 
he had been a buccaneer. He seems to have been gifted by 
nature with fertile invention, an ardent temperament, and 
great powers of persuasion, and to have acquired somewhere 
in the course of his vagrant life a perfect knowledge of 
accounts." 

Premising that the name of William Paterson is a very 
common one in Scotland, the fact remains that there are 
several singular coincidences which seem to go far in sup- 
port of a theory that the persons referred to above under the 
same name are one and the same individual. The principal 
accounts of what is known of the life of William Paterson 
have been written by Mr. Saxe Bannister ^ and by Mr. Wil- 
liam Pagan, 2 but neither of these writers has contributed 
much to our knowledge of Paterson's earlier years. 

In discussing this matter, it is necessary first of all to 
notice an alleged discovery made by Mr. Bannister, which, if 
the facts stated therein he reliable, effectually disposes of any 
notion that William Paterson, the financier and projector of 
the Scotch colony of Darien, could have been the person of 
that name in New York in 1668-69. This is a statement 
respecting his own age, claimed by Bannister to exist in the 
will of William Paterson, — a statement not only of an 
extraordinary nature in itself, but one which, though of the 
utmost importance to their respective writings, is treated 
with such amazing carelessness, by both Bannister and 
Pagan, as to deprive their remarks upon the subject of any 
substantial value. 

1 Life and Trials of William Paterson, by S. Bannister, 1858-59. 

2 The Birthplace and Parentage of William Paterson. By W. Pagan. Edin- 
burgh, 1865. 




William Patersox. 

From a wash-drawing in the British Museiir 



i 



WILLIAM PATERSON THE FINANCIER 207 

After fixing, according to his belief, the place of Pater- 
son's birth to a farm called Skipmj're in the parish of 
Tinwall, in the southern portion of Dumfries shire, in 
Scotland 1 (of which parish, however, no ancient baptismal 
records exist), Bannister remarks (page 35): "The time of 
his birth can be settled exactly from his will, in which he 
states himself to be, at its date, the 1st day of July, 1718, 
sixty-three years and three months old, which refers his 
birth to March or April, 1655." On page 425 of his work, 
Bannister gives in full (or in what purports to be so) the will 
of William Paterson, in which there is 7iot the least allusion 
to his age ; nor is this explained or corrected in a subsequent 
edition of Bannister's work. 

To make matters worse, Pagan, in his sketch of Paterson's 
life, says (page 6) that the will, as quoted by Mr. Bannister, 
from the record in Doctors' Commons, London, runs as fol- 
lows, etc., etc.: "In witness whereof I have hereto sub- 
scribed my name and put my seal, at Westminster this 1st 
day of July, 1718, in the sixtieth year and third month of 
my age. (Signed) Wm. Paterson." 

Under ordinary circumstances, it would be necessary, first, 
to resort to the original will, to know what this statement as 
to age really was (if it existed in fact), and then to examine 
why this strange clause was inserted at all in the instrument, 
— for most persons who are familiar with the forms of Eng- 
lish wills must recognize the fact that a statement of age is 

1 Not far from where, in an almost Italian landscape of lakes, groves, meadows, 

cornfields, and distant mountains, Lochmaben stands, in the vale of Annan, — the 

land of the Johnstones, sung by many a Scottish poet, and enriched with many 

a legend of border warfare : 

% 

" As I came by Lochmaben gate, 

There I saw the Johnstones riding : 
Away they go, and fear no foe, 

Wi' their drums a-beating, colors flying. 
A' the lads o' Annandale 

Came there their valiant chiefs to follow, 
Brave Burleigh, Ford, and Ramerscale, 

Wi' Winton, and the gallant Rollo," etc. 



208 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

most unusual in such documents, and is apparently made 
for some distinct purpose. 

There are, however, so many clear indications that this 
statement of age (either of sixty or of sixty-three years) is 
erroneous, and that Paterson's age must have been at least 
ten years greater than the highest age given above, that we 
may assume, for the present purpose, that one or the other of 
these ages is really given in the will, without at all conceding 
the accuracy of the statement there made. What Paterson's 
mental condition was at the time of making this will (exe- 
cuted only a few months before his death) we cannot tell. 
He had undoubtedly fallen upon dark days, had given up the 
house in Westminster, in which he had long resided ; and at 
the time of making his will, he was staying at the Ship Inn 
(on the north side of the Strand, some half-dozen houses west 
of old Temple Bar, in London), in a condition which appears 
to have approached destitution. Whether age, poverty, 
disappointments, and sickness may have impaired the once 
active memory of this strange character, or whether the age 
statement was designedly inserted to increase the mystery 
about a period of his life which he wished to remain obscure, 
one can only surmise. Some matters in apparent contradic- 
tion should now be noticed. 

I. William Paterson's ingenious and profound financial 
theories are known to have been elaborated by him and 
brought to public attention in several European countries 
(though unsuccessfully) as early as 1686 or 1687, — at which 
period, if his age as given in the will is correct, he must have 
been only twenty-eight or thirty years old. This, of course, 
is not impossible, and Paterson's ideas are undoubtedly, to a 
certain extent, the intuitions of genius ; but they are intui- 
tions founded upon a knowledge which must have been 
acquired only by long and varied observation of human 
nature, and by experience of the most diverse business 
operations ; insomuch that it is very difficult to believe that 
he should have been able to acquire and to digest such 
knowledge at the age named. 



HODGES' PAMPHLET ON PATERSON 20^ 

II. It seems to be generally conceded that Paterson's 
wandering life began with his flight from Scotland in his 
youth, to escape trouble arising in some way out of the reli- 
gious persecutions under which the Scottish Presbyterians 
were suffering at the hands of the dominant Church of Eng- 
land party, which, though few in numbers, became the 
ruling faction at the Restoration of monarchy in Eng- 
land in 1660. It appears to be further conceded that after 
a short sojourn in England, during which he followed the 
avocation of a pedler, he made his way thence to the West 
Indies. 

In an old pamphlet in the Bodleian Library, Mr. Eliot 
Warburton, who wrote a semi-historical romance, of which 
Paterson was the hero, found it stated, as he claims, that 
Paterson's family, being alarmed by intelligence of warrants 
having been issued against him, on a charge of being a con- 
federate of the proscribed Presbyterians, " he went speedily 
away into England, and took refuge there with a relative of 
his mother, a widow at Bristol." 

A scurrilous pamphlet was written by one Hodges, in the 
interest of Paterson's enemies, at the time of the Darien 
scheme, or about the year 1699. In this it is said that he 
" came from Scotland in his younger years, with a pack on 
his back, whereof the print may be seen, if he be alive. 
Having travelled this country some years, he seated himself 
under the wing of a warm widow near Oxford, where, 
finding that preaching was an easier trade than his own, he 
soon found himself gifted with an anaclets spirit. Prophets 
being generally despised at home, he went on the propaganda 
fide account to the West Indies, and was one of those who 
settled the isle of Providence a second time. But meetingr 
some hardships and ill-luck there, to wit, a Governor being 
imposed on them by the king of England, which his con- 
science could not admit of, the prospects of their constitution 
were altered, and they could no longer have a free port and 
sanctuary for buccaneers, pirates, and such vermin. . . . 
This disappointment obliged Predicant Paterson to shake 

14 



210 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

the dust from off his shoes, and leave that island under his 
anathema.''^ Now let us see what the reference to the island 
of Providence means. 

It was about in the year 1664 that the freebooter, Mans- 
veld (of unknown nationality), who had acquired a leadership 
among the buccaneers or piratical adventurers who then 
swarmed in the West Indies, conceived the design of form- 
ing a permanent establishment or headquarters upon one of 
the islands of the West Indian seas. The spot selected was 
the small island of Santa Catalina, afterwards known as 
Providence, situated a little more than a hundred miles east 
of the " Mosquito Shore " of Honduras, and some four hun- 
dred miles southwest of the island of Jamaica; it was called 
Old Providence, to distinguish it from New Providence in 
the Bahama Islands. This island was already in the posses- 
sion of the Spaniards, who had fortified it; but in the year 
above named, Mansveld attacked it with a mixed force of 
French and English buccaneers, captured the island with the 
Spanish soldiers, and established there a garrison of his own 
men. In order to lend an air of legitimacy to his operations, 
Mansveld attempted to secure the sanction and aid of the 
English Governor of Jamaica; this, however, he was unable 
to get, — • not at all on account of the character of his per- 
formance, but apparently because of the jealousy of the 
governor. While attempting to secure aid elsewhere, Mans- 
veld died, and the command came to his lieutenant, the 
notorious Henry Morgan, a Welshman. 

In the mean time, while the affairs of the buccaneers were 
yet in uncertainty, the Spaniards, in the summer of 1665, 
as we learn from Spanish authorities, recaptured the island, 
taking the garrison of buccaneers prisoners. Morgan, how- 
ever, never lost sight of his predecessor's design, and after 
some time spent in recruiting his force of adventurers, and 
in committing depredations upon the Spaniards, he appears 
to have regained possession of Old Providence at a date 
which is not accurately known, the accounts being very 



PATERSON IN THE BAHAMAS 211 

vague and conflicting, but which is supposed, to have been 
in 1666 or 1667.1 

Bannister has apparently confounded this island of Santa 
Catalina, or Providence, with New Providence in the Baha- 
mas, for he says (page 45 of his work) : " In a contemporary 
tract, written by James Hodges, who was then employed by 
the English minister to attack the Scottish Company, it is 
asserted that Paterson joined in the settlement of New Provi- 
dence in the Bahamas,^ a highly probable fact." 

Now as for this latter island, its history, in brief, is this: 
it was first settled in 1629 by the English, and was held by 
them till 1641, when they were expelled by the Spaniards. 
The latter, however, did not attempt to establish themselves 
upon this island, and it remained unoccupied till the year 
1667, when it was again taken possession of by the English, 
— at which date William Paterson was only ten or twelve 
years old, if the statement in the will is correct; so that it 
would not at all be "a highly probable fact" that he was 
"one of those who settled the isle of Providence a second 
time," but, on the contrary, highly improbable. 

The reference by Hodges, however, to Paterson's presence 
at the island of Providence is so distinctly in the nature of a 
slur, and derives its point so directly from his alleged connec- 
tion with the buccaneers, that one can scarcely come to the 
conclusion that any other meaning was intended by that 

1 The island was retaken by Morgan in all probability before the treaty of 
13-23 May, 1667, coucluded between Great Britain and Spain at Madrid, by 
which the occupatiou of several disputed territories by the respective powers was 
ratified and confirmed to each. It is thought by the writer to be this sort of 
legalization of possession and its attendant results which are referred to by 
Ilodges in the extract given in the text, when he speaks of a governor being 
imposed on the so-called " settlers " of the island of Providence. This treaty of 
1667, though it was immediately and grossly violated by the buccaneers, was pre- 
served by the terms of the more elaborate and bettor-known treaty of peace and 
amity, oblivion of injuries, etc., negotiated between the two countries by Lord 
Godolphin in the year 1670: "Que de ninguna manera se entiendan al)olidos 
b derogados por b^s presentes articulos y conveneioucs el tratado de paz o amistad 
ajustado en Madrid el dia l^ de Mayo," etc. 

2 This is merely Bannister's inference. The pamphlet does not say so at all, 
as will be seen from the quotation above. 



212 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

writer than that Paterson was present at the first or second 
capture of Santa Catalina. The importance of Hodges' 
statement, however, lies not in its proving or tending to 
prove that Paterson actually was at either Providence or 
New Providence in the years 1664 to 1667, but that his 
contemporaries generally must have ascribed to him an age 
sufficiently great to have relieved this statement from the 
charge of absurdity to which it would have been open, had 
Paterson been born in the year 1658 or in 1655; in other 
words, that he was generally considered at the time of 
Hodges' pamphlet, in 1699, to be a man of fifty years of age 
and over, rather than of about forty. 

III. It has been already stated that writers are agreed 
that William Paterson's departure from Scotland was in 
some manner owing to the persecutions by the Church of 
England party against the Scottish Presbyterians. These 
persecutions had their origin in what is known in English 
Church history as the "Act of Uniformity," of October, 
1662, under which the Scottish clergymen were ordered to 
conform to the rites of the Church of England. Refusing to 
do so, most of them were driven from their pulpits; and as 
they persisted in preaching at what were known as conven- 
ticles, or gatherings in private houses, or in the woods and 
fields, a severe act against this practice was passed in 1664 ; 
and this proving ineffectual, in 1665 a force of troops was 
sent into the west of Scotland to put down the refractory 
clergy and their supporters; and during the period from 
1665 to 1667, the troops being then commanded by Sir James 
Turner and the notorious "Tom Dalziel," great cruelties 
were inflicted upon the unfortunate Presbyterians, and multi- 
tudes of them were compelled to fly from the country. The 
persecutions by the English Church party were spasmodic in 
their nature. A lull followed Dalziel's bloody performances, 
and then, in 1669 and 1670, persecution again broke out, 
and many more of the Scots fled from their country. It is 
evident, however, that if the dates of Paterson's birth, as 



PATERSON'S PRESENCE IN NEW YORK 213 

given by Bannister and by Pagan, — 1655 or 1658, — are, 
either of them, correct, it could have been neither of these 
persecutions that drove William Paterson out of Scotland. ^ 
A long period of inaction now followed, while the English 
court was coquetting with the dissenters, in order to gain 
their political support; and it was not until 1679-80, the 
period of the murder of Archbishop Sharpe and of the 
battle of Bothwell Brigg, that the non-conformists again 
felt the heavy hand of the government, at which time the 
allusions referred to above, as to Paterson's subsequently 
taking part in the settlement of the island of Providence, 
etc., would have lost all meaning. 

If William Paterson, the financier and statesman of Great 
Britain, was born in the year 1655, or in 1658, we know 
nothing definite, and are not likely to ever know anything 
of his early history, because all the theories which we can 
reasonably form seem to be met by apparently irreconcilable 
facts. If, on the contrary, Paterson was a man at least ten 
years older, we have certainly a succession of events which 
are not only consistent with the historical data which we 
have respecting him, but are also consistent with his having 
been a resident of New York and of Albany in the years 
1668-69. In this aspect of the case one might readily form 
a theory that William Paterson, — then a young man of 
eighteen or nineteen, — driven from his home in Scotland by 
the Conventicle Act of 1661, had found his way to the West 
Indies, and had placed himself under Morgan's command, in 
time to take part in the capture of the island of Providence 
in about the year 1666; and that after the treaty of 1667, 
either tiring of his connection with his rough associates, or 
the strong moral sense with which he was undoubtedly 
endowed, rebelling against their performances, he had 
quitted his companions and made his way to New York in 
the next year. We have even the fact that in 1668, a 
piratical or quasi-piratical vessel actually arrived at New 

1 The so-called Conventicle Act and its penalties only applied to persons over 
sixteen years of age. 



214 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

York from the West Indies, and was the subject of certain 
proceedings tliere in the Court of Admiralty. This was the 
so-called privateer "Cedar." She seems to have been a 
Spanish vessel which had recently been captured with a 
cargo of Campeachy wood, in the West Indies, by Captain 
Thomas Salter of Port Royal in the island of Jamaica, who 
is described as "commander of a private man-of-war." Salter 
placed a crew upon the vessel, under the command of Wil- 
liam Smith as master, with orders to carry her to Jamaica ; 
but Captain Smith determined to make a voyage on his own 
account, and accordingly sailed for New York. Whom the 
vessel brought with her we do not know, as the proceedings 
only allude incidentally to a few of the crew ; but it is cer- 
tain that the first information we have of William Paterson 
in New York was very soon after the arrival of this vessel. 
If, as a matter of conjecture (for there is certainly no proof), 
any portion of the spoils of the Spaniards in the West Indies 
— or possibly of Morgan's sack of the town of Porto Bello, 
in 1668 — actually went into the purchase of Paterson's 
various parcels of real estate in New York, he was fully 
confirmed in its possession, and released from any possible 
apprehensions of the criminal law, by Lord Godolphin's 
" Treaty of Oblivion " with Spain, which was promulgated 
in July, 1669,1 though it was not formally ratified by the 
British and Spanish governments till the following year. It 
will be noticed that this date coincides closely with Pater- 
son's departure from New York and his presumed return to 
Europe. 

1 See Bridges, " Annals of .Jamaica," page 266. This famous treaty contains 
the following provisions (Article VII.) : "Que todas las ofensas, perdidas, danos 
e injurias que las naciones Espauola e' inglesa huvieron padecido reciprocamente 
en la America en qualesquiera tiempos passados, por qualquier causa d pretexto 
per una d otra de las partes, se pongan en olvido, y se borren enteramente de la 
memoria, como si nunca huviessen succedido." 

" That all offences, losses, depredations, and wrongs which the Spanish and 
English nations shall have reciprocally suffered in America, in whatever times 
past, upon whatever cause or pretext, upon either side, shall he buried in oblivion 
and entirely bani shed from meinori/, as if they had never happened." 



SIGNATURES OF PATERSON 215 

There is another matter of some importance which remains 
to be considered. In the Colonial Records at Albany we 
possess two of the original signatures of William Paterson of 
New York. One of these is affixed to the complaint made 
by him against Captain Baker, already alluded to ; the other, 
to a bond given by Paterson to prosecute that officer. Upon 
comparing these signatures with the known signatures of 
William Paterson, the Scottish statesman, much apparent 
dissimilarity appears on a casual view. Examining them, 
however, more carefully, we find that the apparent difference 
is chiefly owing to a series of complicated and clumsy flour- 
ishes at the beginning and at the end of the signatures of 
1669. Leaving these out of view, and remembering that — 
upon the theory that the signatures were made by the same 
individual — we are comparing the handwriting of a very 
young man, of not much school education, and fresh from a 
life of hardship and adventure, with that made forty or fifty 
years later by the fluent writer and pamphleteer, deeply 
immersed in important political and business enterprises, — 
and there certainly seems to be a very striking, indeed, 
almost startling resemblance between the signatures. The 
very peculiar form of the capital letter P will be noticed at 
once. A comparison of the signatures is as follows : — 




1. Signature of William Paterson to the complaint against 
Captain Baker, August 14, 1660.1 




\ 



1 From N. Y. Colouial MSS. Vol. 22, page 78. 



216 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

2. Same from bond or recognizance of Paterson to prose- 
cute Captain Baker for burglary, etc., August 19, 1669.1 



/6SS. 




3. From an original letter of 1699 in the Advocates 
Library, Edinburgh, (Taken from Bannister's Work.) 




4. From an original letter in the British State Paper 
Office, of December 18, 1718. (From Bannister's Work.) 

As to the body of the documents in the Colonial Records 
which have just been alluded to, they are evidently drawn 
up by another hand, doubtless either by an attorney or by 
the court clerk ; but the language of the complaint is, in all 
probability, that of the complainant himself. Now those 
familiar with the writings of the financier and statesman will 
remember that he is exceedingly prone to allude frequently, 
in a reverent manner, to the interpositions of Divine Provi- 
dence in the affairs of men. His account of the Darien 
expedition, especially, contains many such allusions, and 
one can hardly peruse them without recurring at once to the 
words of the complaint at Albany: "he came in with his 
sword drawn and pointed at this complainant, with intent to 

1 From N. Y. Col. MSS., Vol. 22, page 89. 



MYSTERY OF PATERSON'S LIFE 217 

have killed him, which he likewise would have done, in case 
it was not hindered by the Providence of God." 

In studying the life of William Paterson, as presented to 
us by his biographers, one receives the impression that he 
is considering the career of a man of strong and vigorous 
character, of great natural abilities, of wide experience of 
men and of affairs, it is true; but still of one who has been 
exalted by circumstances into a position of great public 
prominence, 1 beyond what he could have anticipated, or 
perhaps even have hoped for. Some unknown sentiment, 
however, possibly pride, or possibly a sense of moral pro- 
priety, seems to be operating constantly upon him, inducing 
him to throw himself into the background, as it were, and to 
cover his own individuality with an air of mystery and of 
obscurity, especially in so far as his early life was concerned. 
Deeply interested in, and intimately acquainted with, the 
trade of the West Indies, as he was, and voluminous writer 
as he was upon that subject, — projector of the Darien colony, 
in which expedition he took a personal part and of which he 
has given a long account, — he affords us nowhere any definite 
information as to how he acquired his knowledge relating to 
those parts of the globe, or as to his personal experiences 
there, except the one allusion which seems, as it were, to 
escape from him inadvertently, when speaking of his en- 
countering in the West Indies, upon the Darien expedition 

1 " The great projector," says Macaulay, iu speaking of the Darien scheme, 
" was the idol of the whole nation. Men spoke to him with more profound 
respect than to the Lord High Commissioner. His antechamber was crowded 
with solicitors desirous to catch some drops of that golden shower of which he 
was supposed to be the dispenser. To be seen walking with him in the High 
Street, to be honored by him with a private interview of a quarter of an hour, 
were enviable distinctions." And again : " His countenance, his voice, his ges- 
tures, indicated boundless self-importance. When he appeared in public he 
looked — such is the language of one wlio probably had often seen him — like 
Atlas, conscious that a world was on his shoulders. But the airs which he gave 
himself only heightened the respect and admiration which he inspired. His 
demeanor was regarded as a model. Scotchmen, who wished to be thought wise, 
looked as like Paterson as they could." 



218 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

in 1698, a certain Captain Richard Moon, he says: "This 
man I had known in Jamaica many years before." ^ 

Was William Paterson's strange self-concealment due to 
the unhappy experiences of his younger years in the West 
Indies and in New York, which (after the fashion of Lord 
Godolphin with the exploits of the English freebooters) he 
wished to be " buried in oblivion, and entirely banished from 
memory " ? We can only answer in the favorite words of the 
Jewish historian, Josephus, when he encounters a particu- 
larly knotty question of history or of human conduct: "Now 
as to these matters let every one determine as he pleases." 

To the eastward of the house and land of Charles Bridges 
(formerly that of Thomas Willet) was, at the time of our 
survey, a narrow lane, leading from the High Street down to 
the East River shore. This lane, which occupied the site of 
the present building, No. 52 Stone Street, and which has 
been previously alluded to,^ is shown upon "The Duke's 
Plan," of 1661, but appears to have been closed within the 
next two or three years, ^ as it is not shown upon the Nicoll 
map of about 1666; it is, however, alluded to in a deed of 
1672, as "a certain narrow lane," and may have been still 
used, in part, as a private lane at the latter date. This lane 
separated the original grant of Thomas Willet from that of 
bis English neighbor, Richard Smith. 

Richard Smith, a native of Gloucestershire, in England, 
was one of the pioneers of the New England settlements. 

1 Paterson arrived at New York in August, 1699, on his return from the 
Darien Expedition. He was at this time, as he tells us, so sick that his life was 
despaired of. The order permitting him to bring his baggage ashore is to be 
found in the Council Minutes ; it bears date Aug. 23, 1699. 

2 See ante, page 172. 

8 On the the 28th of March, 1658, Solomon La Chair, who at that time had 
a lot upon which he kept a small tavern, which lot immediately adjoined the 
lane referred to above, on the west, requested of the burgomasters to know 
" whether the street lying beside his lot to the left of Carel van Brugge, and 
bought from him, shall be given for a lot, or if a street shall remain." To this 
request, the magistrates caused a reply to be made, that " the street remains 
provisionally for the use of the city till further order." 



RICHARD SMITH 219 

He came at an early day to Plymouth Colony, and was one 
of the principal men among those who, pushing out through 
the sandy forests westwards, a score of miles or more, 
founded the old town of Taunton, where the dark waters of 
the Taunton River flowed sluggishly through overhanging 
woods and bushes. Smith appears to have been a man of 
some independence in his views upon church dogmas, — like 
Roger Williams, with whom he was intimately connected; 
and his intolerant associates in the Taunton settlement 
annoying him on this account, he removed still further to 
the west, and, having purchased a tract of land from the 
Indians, on the west side of Narragansett Bay, he erected a 
trading house, about 1638, in what is now North Kingston, 
in the State of Rhode Island, — his nearest English neighbors 
for several years being at Warwick, nearly ten miles up the 
bay. 

It was probably at Taunton that Richard Smith became 
acquainted with the Reverend Francis Doughty, a dissenting 
English clergyman, who had come over to the Plymouth 
Colony, hoping to enjoy liberty of conscience there, but who 
was harassed and forced to take refuge beyond the Narragan- 
sett Bay, much as Richard Smith had been. These men, 
with a few others, resolved to resort to New Amsterdam in 
search of a settlement; and there, on the 28th of March, 
1642, Francis Doughty obtained, for the benefit of himself 
and of his associates, from Director-General Kieft, a jDatent 
for more than thirteen thousand acres, forming the larger 
portion of the subsequent town of Newtown, upon Long 
Island, in the present Borough of Queens, New York City. 
Richard Smith seems to have taken part in the settlement 
which was immediately commenced near the Mespat Kill 
(now Newtown Creek), and it seems quite probable that 
"Smith's Island," a small island in the Newtown Creek, 
upon which, some ten or twelve years later, it was proposed 
to establish a village to be called Arnhem, received its 
name from this man. 

In 1643, after the breaking out of the Indian war, the 



220 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

settlement along the Mespat Kill was destroyed by the 
natives ; and Richard Smith, in order to attend to his inter- 
ests here, probably found it necessary to establish a residence 
in New Amsterdam, which he did by acquiring, in 1645, the 
plot upon Hoogh Straet which we are now considering, and 
by building a house for himself about upon the site of the 
present warehouse, No. 56 Stone Street. The building 
would ajDpear to have been of the usual English cottage 
type, — a low double house, broad side to the street, — for, 
in 1651, we are informed, in an instrument affecting the 
property, that the east end of the structure was then occu- 
pied by one Randel Hewit. 

Smith himself, in all probability, only made occasional use 
of this house, either for a residence or for storehouse pur- 
poses. He still retained his trading house on Narragansett 
Bay, and as early as 1651 he was the master of a coasting 
vessel, — a bark called the "Welcome," with which he made 
occasional voyages to the Dutch settlements on the South or 
Delaware River. ^ His New Amsterdam possessions appear 
to have been, much of the time, under the care of his son, 
Richard Smith, junior, — who afterwards became prominent 
as the patentee of most of the territory now known as Smith- 
town, in Suffolk County on Long Island, bearing there the 
appellation of Richard Smith, senior, to distinguish him from 
his son Richard, grandson of the original colonist. 

Richard Smith seems to have been somewhat unfortunate 
with his property in New Amsterdam. As early as 1651, 

1 The nature of a part of Smith's trading operations appears in a suit brought 
by him against Cornelis Melyn of Staten Island, in 1660. It seems that about 
the year 1655, Meh'n was owing Smith something like nine pounds sterling; 
and the latter agreed to take, in satisfaction for his debt, " two ankers of strong 
waters," which were to be delivered to him at Melyn's liouse upon Staten Island. 
Smith, however, delayed removing his property until the Indian War of 1655 
broke out, in which the Indians destroyed Melyn's house and made short work 
of Richard Smith's " strong waters." Subsequently, during Melyn's absence in 
the Netlierlands, Smith came with several Englishmen, and, as was claimed by 
Melyn, terrified the wife of the latter into signing a promissory note as agent of 
her husband, for the amount of the original debt. The matter appears to have 
been compromised between the parties. 



RICHARD SMITH'S HOUSE 221 

he had sold the house to one Gillis Pietersen, but appears to 
have soon had it back upon his hands, probably by virtue of 
a mortgage which he held. During the long absences of 
himself and of his son, the place appears to have become 
neglected. The easternmost lot of the property having been 
sold within a year or so after the time of our survey, to the 
glassmaker, Evert Duyckingh, who had built upon it, we 
find, in 1659, the burgomasters of the town, who erroneously 
supposed that Duyckingh owned the whole parcel, serving a 
notice upon him to improve the same; in answer to this he 
appears before the magistrates, and disclaims the ownership 
of the property, but says that he is authorized by the owner 
to sell it, and that " Mr. Smit himself has valued it at five 
hundred beavers." By 1662, Smith had succeeded in clos- 
ing out his interests in New Amsterdam, his house and most 
of the plot of land having been sold to one Jan Hendricksen 
Stilman, a well-known character of the town, to whom the 
nickname of Koopal, or " Buy Everything " had been given 
by his neighbors; the house, at this time, is somewhat 
dubiously described as "a superstructure." 

This transaction apparently terminated the connection of 
Richard Smith with the town of New Amsterdam. He lived 
for a number of years afterwards, and is spoken of in terms 
of warm esteem by his friend, the famous Roger Williams. 
"Mr. Richard Smith," says the latter, writing in 1679, "for 
his conscience to God, left fair possessions in Glostershire, 
and adventured, with his relations and estates to N. Eng- 
land, and was a most acceptable inhabitant and prime leading 
man in Taunton, in Plymouth Colony. For his conscience 
sake, many differences arising, he left Taunton and came to 
the Nahiggonsik country, where by God's Mercy, and the 
favor of the Nahiggonsik sachems, he broke the ice at his 
great charge and hazard, and put up in the thickest of the 
barbarians, the first English house amongst them. . . . He 
kept possession, coming and going, himself, children, and 
servants, and he had quiet possession of his housing, lands, 
and meadow ; and there, in liis own house, with much seren- 



222 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

it}'' of soul and comfort, he yielded up his spirit to God, the 
Father of Spirits, in peace." 

A short distance east of Richard Smith's plot of ground 
upon the East River, the land between the road and the river 
shore was intersected by the gully or ravine, known as 
"Burger's Path." A small parcel of ground intervened, 
however, containing about fifty English feet front upon the 
road, or Hoogh Straet, and extending some eighty feet or 
thereabouts to the crumbling bank above the beach. Upon 
this ground, just about at the period of our survey, Abraham 
Martensen Clock and Tryntje, his huysvrouw, had built for 
themselves a small house. This stood apparently near the 
bank of the river, and about at the southwestern corner of the 
site of the modern building now known as the Old Cotton 
Exchange. Abraham Clock received his ground-brief for 
this parcel of land in the year 1655, it being described as a 
"lot on the east side of the lot of Richard Smith, and on the 
west side of the road which Burger Joris uses to go to the 
river side." The premises seem to have contained a well of 
some repute, the site of which is clearly marked in the con- 
veyances of this property, and which may, indeed, still exist 
under the Old Cotton Exchange which at the present day 
covers Abraham Clock's modest holding, — house-site, gar- 
den, and all. Tliis well was at the right of the entrance to 
the modern building, upon Hanover Square, and about eigh- 
teen feet back from the street line. 

Of Abraham Clock, but little is known; he was living 
here as late as 1664, but died within a few years after that 
date. One of the trials of his humble life at this spot was 
that his plot of ground was subject to the encroachments of 
the waves at high tides. Later, in 1672, when his widow, 
Tryntje, had been ordered to fill out the street, or Waal, in 
front of her premises, and also the hollow way upon the east, 
she declared herself unable to have the work done ; and the 
magistrates of the city decided to render her special aid, " as 
she has so much to do." 



CHAPTER XVII 

HANOVER SQUARE AND BURGER'S PATH. — BURGER JORIS- 
SEN, THE SMITH. — THE THIRTY YEARS' WAR. — HEN- 
DRICK JANSEN, THE TAILOR, AND HIS OPINION OF 
DIRECTOR KIEFT. — SMITH STREET 

" That frae November till October, 
Ae market-day thou was nae sober ; 
That ilka melder wi' the miller, 
Thou sat as lang as thou had siller ; 
That ev'ry naig was ca'd a shoe on, 
The smith and thee gat roaring fou on." 

Burns : " Tam o' Shanter." 

WE are at Hanover Square, — not a very stately locality, 
perhaps; but a place replete with historical associa- 
tions, — of Burger Jorissen, rough and intemperate at times, 
but a vigorous pioneer of the new colony ; of Hendrick Jansen, 
the virulent enemy of Director Kieft; of Go vert Loocker- 
mans, the shipping merchant, a pioneer of the commerce of 
New Amsterdam, as enterprising in his way upon the sea as 
was Burger Jorissen upon the land. Half of the political 
history of the colony, during the reign of William III., centres 
about this spot, with its memories of Nicholas Bayard, of the 
judicially murdered Leisler and Milborne, and of the patient 
and long-suffering Elsie Leisler and her widowed daughter 
Mary Milborne. The tortuous policy of King William's 
government with the piratical adventurers, too, should not be 
forgotten ; and there are not wanting associations here to call 
up the names of the Earl of Bellomont and of Captain 
William Kidd. The Square might well have received the 
name of Orange, or of Nassau, as representative of King Wil- 
liam's times, but it was named at a somewhat later date, 



224 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

when the elector of Hanover came to the throne. The Scotch 
Jacobites, at this time, with their bitter hatred of what they 
considered as the usurpation of a petty German prince, were 
singing ; 

" Wha the deil hae we gotten now for a king, 

But a wee, wee German lairdie ! 
And when we gaed to bring him hame, 

He was delving in his kail-yardie ; 
Sheughing kail and laying leeks, 
Wi'out the hose and but the breeks ; 
And up his beggar duds he cleeks, — 

The wee, wee German lairdie." 

The Hanoverian party was in control, however, and the 
little triangular patch of ground in New York received the 
name of Hanover Square, in honor of King George I. 

It is not, we have said, a very stately locality. The tall 
buildings of tlie Coffee and of the Cotton Exchanges look 
down upon an open space covered with smooth asphalt over 
which crowds stream in all directions, — mainly to and from 
the station of the elevated railway which mars its southern 
side ; no sprig of green vegetation is in sight, and warehouses 
along the south side of Pearl Street cut off all view of the river. 

A very different scene presented itself in the seventeenth 
century, however. Then, from the narrow roadway along the 
north side of the " square," all the intervening ground, to the 
river's edge beyond the present Pearl Street, was a grassy 
bank shaded by native forest trees, under which strollers 
from the town sometimes whiled the time away, or visiting 
Indians camped. Immediately in front of the spot where now 
stands the building known as the Old Cotton Exchange, a 
gully or shallow ravine led down to the river beach ; this had 
been deepened, for the purpose of making a passage or cart- 
way to the shore, by Burger Jorissen ; insomuch that in 
1646 the council made an order that he " must rail or fence 
the road which is made before his door, so that no persons 
may fall in ; and that it be a good wagon road." ^ This pas- 

1 The condition of this locality in 1679 is shown in the plate at page 188 of 
this work. 




K SP 






THE THIRTY YEARS' WAR 225 

sageway was known as " Burger's Path " for more than a 
century. Nearly opposite it, upon the north side of Hoogh 
Straet, just about at the little bookstoi'e in the rear portion of 
the building, now (1901) occupying the northwest corner of 
William and Stone streets, stood the house built about 1644 
by Hendrick Jansen, the tailor, but soon sold to Burger 
Jorissen. Immediately east of this, at the present corner of 
the last-mentioned streets, but infringing somewhat upon 
Stone Street (which has been straightened), was the black- 
smith's shop of Jorissen. William Street did not as yet exist, 
and its ground, with about half of the New Cotton Exchange 
upon the east of it, formed originally Burger Jorissen's gar- 
den, and possibly a small orchard, — for his plot contained 
about three-quarters of an acre of land. About a hundred 
and twenty-five feet farther down the road stood the comfort- 
able residence of Govert Loockermans, in a large enclosure of 
ground sloping down to a small pond, and with green fields 
behind it; a small intermediate house stood along the road 
which seems to have been at an earlier date the dwelling- 
house of Dirck Cornelissen, and to have passed into the posses- 
sion of Loockermans upon his marriage to Dirck Cornelissen's 
widow. A short distance, still farther, at a small turn in the 
road, stood two or three more houses, one of which was the 
old tavern of Sergeant Daniel Litscho, and these were the last 
buildings towards the city gate at the present Wall Street. 

Burger Jorissen was, in all probability, a refugee of the 
Thirty Years' War. That terrible struggle, which desolated 
the Germanic countries from 1618 to 1648, undoubtedly 
played a part which has never been fully appreciated, in the 
colonization of New Netherland. It was a conflict which 
carried with it carnage and devastation and misery enough to 
satisfy fully the appetite for military " glory " of the most 
ferocious, the most ignorant, or the most foolhardy. Not the 
lines of marches alone, but whole provinces were ravaged 
indiscriminately by bands of marauders of both the contend- 
ing parties. " No act of cruelty," say the deputies, from 
Pomerania, to the emperor, "could be mentioned, or even 

15 



226 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

thought of, that these savages had not exercised ; and many 
hundreds of the wretched inhabitants, in order to prevent 
these horrible acts from being inflicted upon tliemselves, and 
to escape from dying througli starvation, had committed 
suicide." The original causes of the war were soon lost sight 
of; and no man knew exactly what he was fighting for. 
Scores of leaders sprang up, made names for themselves, per- 
ished by the sword, and were forgotten. There came eventu- 
ally a time when half of the soldiers in the armies had never 
lived in anything but a state of warfare, and when the military 
occupation was tiie only one that many men could turn to for 
their support. The most fortunate of the inhabitants were 
those who could escape from their country, and although this 
was not an easy matter, hosts of them did make their escape, 
mostly into the Netherlands, whence many sought their for- 
tunes in the Dutch establishments in Asia and in America. 
Burger Jorissen's home — the town of Hirschberg in Sile- 
sia — was in one of those quiet nooks of Germany which we 
are least likely to associate with war and bloodshed. Sur- 
rounded by gardens and by meadows and pastures, whitened 
here and there by the linen bleacheries for which it was 
famed, the town lay upon a mountain stream called the Bober 
River, and at the roots of the Riesen Gebirge, the Giants' 
Mountains of Bohemia, about which Geibel has sung, — of 
the sunshine pouring through the fir-trees, the deer rustling 
in the thickets, the streamlets tumbling over mossy rocks : 

" Wie lieblich fliesst durch griine Taunen 
Auf Bohmens Hoh'n dei' Sonne Strahl ! 
Durch's Dickicht rauscht das Reh von dannen, 
Dui'ch Felsen blinkt der Quell ins Thai, 
Und fern zu blauen Bergeswarten 
Verliert sich traumend Aug' und Sinn." 

The young blacksmith, Jorissen, — for that was liis trade, — 
had attained the age of twenty years, when, in 1632, the tide 
of war swept over Silesia, it having been overrun in that year 
by the Swedes and Saxons, after the great victory of Gustavus 



BURGER JORISSEN 227 

Adolphus at Leipzic. As most of the inhabitants of this 
part of Silesia were Lutherans, however, they probably suf- 
fered no great inconvenience at tliis time, but in the following 
year, after the death of Gustavus Adolphus at Lutzen, the 
Swedes were driven out by a division of Wallenstein's army, 
and the Silesians had little favor to expect from the enraged 
Roman Catholic party who now had the ascendancy. It is 
not at all improbable that it was at this period that Burger 
Jorissen quitted his native country. If so, nothing would 
have been more natural at this time than that he should have 
first taken refuge in Sweden, and this may account for the 
fact that as soon as he subsequently became settled in New 
Netherland, he married, in 1639, a young Swedish woman, 
Engeltie Mans. 

However this may be, Burger Jorissen found his way to 
New Netherland in 1637, in which year he came to Rensse- 
laerswyck, now Albany. He did not remain there long, how- 
ever, for in 1639, the year of his marriage, he was at New 
Amsterdam, at which time he was so well thought of by 
Director-General Kieft that he granted to the young smith, 
for four years, " the use of an anvil and bellows, with half of 
the smith's house." It has been already stated ^ that, some- 
where about 1641, Burger Jorissen built the house upon 
Hoogh Straet, which three years afterwards he sold to Cor- 
nehs Melyn, and which at the time of our survey was in the 
possession of the poet, Jacob Steendam. Burger Jorissen 
was evidently a thrifty man, and was soon in a position to en- 
gage in other pursuits than those of his handicraft. At an 
early date, he was the owner of a sloop with which he occa- 
sionally made a trading voyage up the Hudson River ; in the 
capacity of a trader, however, his relations with the colonial 
authorities were not always harmonious, for in the fall of 
1643, the Council placed him in an embarrassing position by 
forbidding him either to depart or to come ashore from his 
vessel, " till he has rendered a correct account and paid the 
duties." It may have been the possession of this vessel, with 

1 See ante, pages 104, 128. 



228 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

its facilities for easy transportation, that induced Jorissen, 
before 1642, to begin the clearing of a plantation for himself, 
in a remote part of what was afterwards the town of Newtown 
upon Long Island, but which was at this time, with the excep- 
tion of two or three widely scattered plantations, an unbroken 
wilderness. 

Nearly a mile up the Mespat Kill of the Dutch, — the 
present Newtown Creek, — there comes in from the north 
through the salt meadows a tributary creek of considerable 
size, known to the Indians as Canapaukah, and this in earlier 
days was navigable for vessels of light draft for about a mile 
towards its head, and to a spot where it approached very near 
the upland. This was the place, in an amphitheatre of low 
hills, or rather knolls, looking towards the south, that Burger 
Jorissen selected for his plantation. In 1G43, he received a 
grant of the land, some fifty-eight or sixty acres, from the Dutch 
government. The locality v/as known, until recent years, by 
the name of " The Dutch Kills ; " and the site of Burger Joris- 
sen's house is occupied, there is little room to doubt, by an 
ancient farmhouse of the eighteenth century, which may be 
seen upon the left-hand side, or north, of the Long Island 
railway, a half-mile or so beyond the Queens County Court 
House at Long Island City. The small morass below it is the 
remains of the mill-pond establislied here some years later by 
Burger Jorissen. In addition to this plantation, Jorissen 
seems to have made use for a time — - no doubt by the per- 
mission of the Director and Council — of the island known 
afterwards as Luyster's Island, lying close to the Long Island 
shore, beyond Hell Gate, and a short distance west of the 
resort now known as North Beach. This island, as being a 
place of security, appears to have been used by him for the 
purpose of herding swine upon it, they being easily conveyed 
to and from it by his vessel, and being there comparatively 
free from danger of the attacks of wolves. 

Burger Jorissen does not appear to have originally intended 
his Long Island bouwery for his own residence. It was leased 
out, as early as 1642, and when he sold his house upon Hoogli 



JANSEN AND DIRECTOR KIEFT 229 

Straet to Cornelis Melyn, in 1644, he immediately took posses- 
sion of another residence upon the same street, the house near 
the present Hanover Square, of which we have spoken above, 
and which he purchased in the last-mentioned year from Hen- 
drick Jansen, the tailor ; this latter personage — characterized 
by a singularly virulent animosity against Director-General 
Kieft, which he displayed all through that officer's administra- 
tion, and which nothing could restrain — deserves some par- 
ticular mention. As early as 1639, Hendrick Jansen is found 
occupying a small parcel of land at the southwest angle of 
the river road and Maagde Paetje, or the modern Pearl Street 
and Maiden Lane, he being one of the very first settlers along 
the East River shore. Selling this property in the latter part 
of 1641, he appears to have soon acquired the land and built 
the house near the present Hanover Square which he after- 
wards sold to Burger Jorissen, though he did not get his for- 
mal deed for it until 1644, — very possibly on account of his 
difficulties with Director Kieft. Jansen's animosity to the 
Director-General, from whatever cause it originated, began 
early. On the 27th of May, 1638, within a month or two of 
the beginning of Kieft's administration, Jansen was prosecuted 
by the fiscal for slander: upon this occasion, we find that 
Hendrick displayed a sagacity which cannot fail to excite our 
admiration, for his defence was that he uttered the slander 
when asleep. He had to do, however, with an adversary who 
was little less astute than himself, and at the instance of the 
fiscal, the Council made an order " that the defendant produce 
proper affidavit that he was asleep when the slander was ex- 
pressed." This proceeding, with its distinct flavor of modern 
comic opera, does not appear to have resulted in anything very 
serious, but in 1642, at a gathering at Burger Jorissen's house, 
at which Jansen was present, " very drunk," as the witnesses 
say, he was much more violent in his language, complaining 
of Kieft as being hostile to him, and refusing him any credit. 
" If I could cringe antl fawn like Frenchmen and English- 
men," he said, " I too could get credit. In short, an effort is 
being made to crush the Netherlanders, and foreigners are en- 



230 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

couraged," then, snapping his fingers, " I don't care a fig for 
it! What does the villain mean? " Then followed, according 
to the witnesses, a highly uncomplimentary and also unprint- 
able reflection upon the Director-General. Tliis affair found 
its way to the ears of Kieft and the Council, and Hendrick 
Jansen was promptly ordered to be put in irons ; he was kept 
in imprisonment for a month, and was then sentenced to ban- 
ishment, but for some reason this was not carried out. Jan- 
sen was still in the country at the time of the Indian massacre 
in the beginning of the next year ; and at a period when all 
tongues were employed in denouncing Kieft, we may be sure 
that Hendrick Jansen's was not silent. In June, 1643, he 
was ordered by the Council to " get ready to depart on the 
' Prince Maurice,' which lies ready to sail," but he found means 
of evading this command. On the 29th of September, 1644, 
he was again before the Council, and was sentenced to a fine 
of 500 guilders for slandering the Director-General, for which 
amount his son-in-law, Gillis Pietersen, gave his promissory 
note.i It was perhaps in preparation for this outcome that thir- 
teen days before, or on the 16th of September, 1644, Jansen 
had transferred to Burger Jorissen his " house, garden, and 
brew-house " for the sum of 1900 guilders, or about S720 of the 
present currency ; and these premises became the abode of 
Jorissen during the remainder of his residence in New Amster- 
dam. As for Hendrick Jansen, he remained in the colony till 
the summer of 1647, when he prepared to return with Kieft 
to the Netherlands, designing, perhaps (as there is little doubt 
that several others of Kieft's enemies did), to call the ex- 
director to account in the Fatherland for his arbitrary pro- 
ceedings. Jansen seems to have been well thought of by his 
neighbors, and carried with him several letters of procuration 
to attend to various business for them in the Netherlands. 
He sailed in the " Princess," and is supposed to have been one 
of those who perished in the wreck of that ill-fated vessel. 
Burger's " smithy," which he soon built near his new house 

^ This may possibly have been a compromise of the sentence of two years 
before, but it has the appearance of having been a new prosecution. 



BURGER'S "SMITHY" AND BREW-HOUSE 231 

upon Hoogh Straet, became a well-known point, as Burger 
himself came to be a well-marked character in the town. The 
circumstances of his life had contributed to give him a some- 
what rough exterior, but he seems to have been good-hearted 
and generally liked. The small " brew-house " which he had 
received from Hendrick Jansen, and the acquaintance with 
the brewer's processes, which he as well as many otlier men of 
his day possessed, was not an unmixed good to him. In 1646, 
he was prosecuted and fined for selling beer without paying 
the excise tax. He denied the general charge, but admitted 
that three half-barrels were drunk in his house " with some 
company." Somewhat sore over this affair, Burger threatened 
the fiscal, or prosecuting officer, that he would " cut a slice " 
out of that official's body, before he got away from the country. 
The aggrieved fiscal immediately instituted a prosecution of 
his own against Burger for these injurious words, whereupon 
the latter appeared before the Council and begged pardon of 
the officer. The fiscal was obdurate, however, and insisted 
that Burger should be fined : the matter was referred to cer- 
tain arbitrators, who reported to the Council that they had 
met, but that Burger " made game of them." The Council 
itself now took the affair in hand and not only fined Burger 
60 guilders, but upon his addressing that body in a manner 
which it considered derogatory to its dignity, it ordered him 
"to remain four and twenty hours in chains." 

Nearly ten years later, Burger retained some of his old 
characteristics, for in 1655 he was prosecuted for assaulting, 
in his own house, when drunk, Joshua Atwater of Stratford, 
Connecticut, in a dispute about an account ; this proceeding 
also Burger regarded as highly unjust to himself, since his 
witnesses showed that he had paid the difference in dispute, 
confessed his fault, " and separated with a drink in friendship 
and harmony." 

Burger Jorissen continued his active life at New Amster- 
dam and its vicinity for many years. Before 1654, he had 
thrown a dam across the Canapaukah Creek near his bouwery 
upon Long Island, and established a mill there, which was 



232 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

famous long after his day under the appelhition of " Burger's 
Mill." This mill was in existence less than a century ago, 
and the mill-dam remained till about 1861, when it is said to 
have been demolished by the building of the Long Island 
railway over its site. Jorissen became a noted character in 
the locality of his bouwery ; the creek up which his boat used 
to sail to the foot of the mill-dam is still occasionally known 
as " Burger's Kill ; " and a small run of water which he 
widened and deepened through the swampy land lying east 
of the mill-pond, to increase the water supply for his mill, 
was long known as " Burger's Sluice." This until within a 
comparatively few years presented itself as a veritable artist's 
study, with its banks lined with alders and overarched by 
swamp maples and whitewoods, with their swinging vines of 
the wild grape. It is now merely a bare and half dry ditch. 

About the year 1654, the opening of several additional 
streets in New Amsterdam was planned, one of which, it was 
pretty well decided, was to pass through Burger Jorissen's 
garden ; he therefore determined to sell the house in which 
he had now resided for about ten years, and to build a new 
house for himself upon the east side of his land. The old 
house, with a long narrow strip of land extending back about 
to the present Beaver Street, was sold in the summer of 1655 
to one Marcus Hendricksen Vogelsang, who, however, only 
kept it till the next year, when it came into the possession of 
Michiel Jansen, a farmer whose plantation at Gamoenepa, or 
Communipaw, had recently been devastated by the Indians, 
at which time, as he states in a petition to the Director and 
Council, " he lost all he had acquired for seventeen years, and 
was left -without means whatever to support himself and six 
children."^ Jansen lived here a short time, but afterwards 
returned to his bouwery at Gamoenepa. 

1 This Michiel Janseu, from Broeckhuysen, came over from tue Nether- 
lands, in 1636. According to the railing catalogue of Secretary van Tienhoven, 
he had been a " boere knecht," or farm laborer. He first went to Rensselaers- 
wyck with his wife and two children. Here he prospered ; but on account of 
some disagreement with the leaders of that colony, he left and came to New 
Amsterdam. For a while he farmed several parcels of land upon Manhattan 



SMITH'S STREET 233 

By the end of 1656, the new street had been laid out: it 
seems to have received its name of Smith's Street from the 
blacksmith whose land it ran through ; ^ and it continued to 
be known by that name until far into the next century, 
when the name of King William, which had been given to an 
extension of this street, was gradually applied to the whole, 
which came to be thus known as William Street. About 
1660, Burger Jorissen sold off in small parcels all of his land 
remaining upon the west side of William Street. His later 
house, the site of which is covered by the New Cotton 
Exchange, was at the eastern corner of William and Stone 
streets, and here he resided during the remainder of his stay 
in New Amsterdam .^ He left the town, however, soon after 
the surrender to the English in 1664, and took up his resi- 
dence upon his Long Island bouwery, selling his house in 
New Amsterdam to Thomas Lewis, in the year 1668. Dur- 
ing the short remainder of his life upon Long Island, he 

Island, but eventually bouf^ht the farm of Jan Evertscn Bout, on the opposite 
side of the North River, pa^'ing for it 8000 guilders, or about $3200 of the pres- 
ent currency. He appears to have died at his plantation in Communipaw some 
time prior to the autumn of 1663. 

1 This appears to be a much more satisfactory explanation of the name of the 
street than that it received its designation from Jan Smedes, the glas.s-maker who 
lived towards the termination of the Slyck Steegh near wliere the new street was 
laid out. He had not been a man of much prominence in the town, and had 
nothing in particular to do with the laying out of the street, so far as can be dis- 
covered. A petition which was made to the burgomasters on the 19th of April, 
16.57, by " the neighbors in the Glazier Street," for " a cartway to the Strand, as 
was promised them," has been taken to refer to the newly opened street, and 
consequently as supporting the notion that the name was derived from Jan 
Smedes. As, however, not only this individual, but also the other principal glass- 
maker of the town. Evert Duyckingh, resided in the Slyck Steegh, it is much 
more likely that this is the " Glazier Street " referred to, and that the petition is 
either a protest against the closing of the easterly portion of the Slyck Steegh 
(which was afterwards carried out), or else that it related to the passageway 
into Hoogh Straet, which still exists under the name of Mill Street or Lane, and 
the lane or passageway nearly opposite, which is now closed, but which then led 
from Hoogh Struct down to the shore of the river. 

2 In the early portion of the eighteenth century, this house became of interest 
as being the residence and place of business of William Bradford, the first estab- 
lished printer in New York; here, in 1725, is supposed to have been issued the 
first number of the " New York Gazette," the pioneer newspaper of the city. 



234 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

became a man of considerable prominence, and was one of 
the patentees named in the Nicoll Patent of the town of 
Newtown in 1666-67, and one of several commissioners 
appointed in 1670 to lay out and regulate roads in that town. 
He died in 1671 at his farm at " The Dutch Kills," leaving a 
family of several adult sons. His widow, Engeltie, however, 
— apparently desirous of returning to the scenes of her earlier 
life, — purchased, some time before 1683, the old house of 
Richard Smith, upon Hoogh Straet, of which prior mention 
has been made.^ Here she resided for many years, with her 
sons Hermanns and Johannes Burger, — for Burger hence- 
forth became the family name : all three of them appear as 
members of the Dutch church, in the list of 1686. Engeltie 
appears to have been a vigorous old lady of somewhat mas- 
culine disposition. She was frequently, as witness or liti- 
gant, before the court at the Stadt Huys, where she was much 
dreaded on account of her loquacity, the magistrates being 
forced to protest against her upon their minutes, as being 
addicted to "an outpouring of many words." She attained 
a great age, but, as she states, in an affidavit which she made 
in tlie year 1701 before the Mayor, that she is " aged seventy 
years, or thereabouts," — which would have made her about 
eight 3^ears of age at the time of her marriage to Burger 
Jorissen, in 1639, — the inference may perhaps arise that her 
memory in her later years was not as good as it had formerly 
been. 

1 See ante, pages 220, 221. 



CHAPTER XVIII 

GOVERT LOOCKERMANS AND HIS FAMILY. -ELSIE LEISLER. 

— THE LOOCKERMANS' HOUSE AND ITS ASSOCIATIONS. 

— CAPTAIN KIDD 

'Le tempg emporte sur son aile 
Et le priutemps et I'hirondelle, 
Et la vie et les jours perdus : 
Tout s'en va comme la fumee, 
L 'espe'rance et la renommee ! " 

A. DE MUSSET. 

IF any person endowed with the gift of an insight into the 
future had predicted to Govert Loockermans, the young 
assistant of the cook on the yacht " St. Martin," upon his 
arrival in New Amsterdam, in the year 1633, that he was to 
become the leading merchant of his day in a town which two 
centuries and a half later was to occupy the position of the 
second city of the world ; that in the next generation his son 
should be a magistrate and physician of note in a then flour- 
ishing but as yet non-existent community, two hundred 
miles away from New Amsterdam through trackless forests ; 
that his step-daughter's husband should take entire possession 
of the government of the New Netherland Colony, claiming 
to hold the same for the King of England, which king should 
at the same time be the Stadth older of the United Nether- 
lands and the head of the historic Nassau-Orange family; 
that this same husband of his step-daughter, together with 
her daughter's husband, should suffer the penalty of death 
for treason in a prosecution principally urged by the members 
of a family into which his (Loockermans) own daughter 
should have married ; that the house which he should build 



236 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

for his residence in New Amsterdam should after his death 
be the home of a man who (whether justly or unjustly) 
should suffer as the most notorious jjirate of his age, but 
that this same man should represent an association of which 
no less a personage than the aforesaid King of England was 
one of the parties, — if all this had been told to Govert 
Loockermans, he would probably have regarded it as the 
ravings of delirium. 

The original home of Govert Loockermans was at Turnhout, 
a town about twenty-five miles northeast of Antwerp, and 
not within the United Provinces, but in that portion of the 
Netlierlands which remained under the Spanish and afterwards 
under the Austrian rule. Coming to New Netherland in 1633 
in a humble capacity, as already mentioned,^ he acquired the 
favorable opinion of Director-General Van Twiller, who pro- 
cured him a situation as clerk in the employ of the West 
India Company : how long he remained in the service of the 
company we do not know, but he is said to have been one 
of the party sent out by Director-General Kieft, in 1640, 
under Secretary A'^an Tienhoven, against the Raritan Indians, 
— upon which occasion, says Clute, in his " Annals of Staten 
Island," he distinguished himself by killing one of the natives 
in cold blood. 

This story, however, may be a mere invention of Loocker- 
mans' enemies, for it is known that a little later he was ac- 
cused of undue partiality towards the Indians, with whom, 
as a fur trader, he must necessarily have had to keep on 
good terms. In 1648, one Govert Aertsen, owner of a sloop 
making occasional voyages to New England, made the extraor- 
dinary application, to the Council at New Amsterdam, for 
a formal certificate that his name was not Govert Loocker- 
mans. It appeared that he had recently been with his sloop 
at Rhode Island, and there some of the inliabitants became con- 
vinced that he was Govert Loockermans, against whom they 
were at that time highly incensed for having sold powder and 

^ It is Secretary Van Tienhoven who, in his sneering way of speaking of the 
principal men of New Amsterdam, calls him "a cook's mate turned trader." 



GOVERT LOOCKERMANS 237 

lead to the New England Indians. Despite his protestations, 
Aertsen came very near being thrown into prison there, a 
clamor having been made for the confiscation of the vessel. It 
is this incident, in part, that leads to the conjecture that G overt 
Loockermans' patronymic was really Aertsen, or Aersen, 
though (as in many other instances) the patronymic was 
not generally used by him. The term " Loockerman " is so 
clearly suggestive of the ship's locker that that designation 
would seem to have been originally applied to him from his 
early avocation, and to have been in tlie end accepted by him 
for convenience' sake. This conjecture certainly tends to 
explain (as will be afterwards mentioned) what is otherwise 
a matter of considerable uncertainty ; namely, the manner 
in which Loockermans acquired the plot upon which he 
resided, at the present Hanover Square. 

About the latter part of 1640, Govert Loockermans re- 
visited the Netherlands, where he remained some months, 
and where, at Amsterdam, in the early part of the year 1641, 
he married Ariaentje Janse. A short time later, accompanied 
by his wife, he sailed for New Amsterdam in the ship " King 
David," having under his ciiarge, as agent for the firm of 
Gillis Verbrugge and Company, a cargo of goods for New 
Netherland. With him came, in all probabihty, his sister 
Anneken, who, in the early part of 1642, was married at New 
Amsterdam to Oloff Stevensen van Cortlandt, of whom 
mention has already been made.^ 

Govert Loockermans now soon became engaged in import- 
ant trading operations upon his own account. In 1642, he 
bought, in conjunction with one Cornells Leendertsen, from 
Isaac Allerton, the leading New England trader, for the 
sum of 1100 guilders, the bark called the " Hope ; " and 
from this time, for a long period, lie was closely connected 
in business enterprises with Allerton. The two acquired 

1 See ante, pa,c;e TO. Tliis lady, the ancestress of tlie American family of Van 
Cortlandt, lived lon<^ in high esteem at New Amsterdam. She survived her 
hiishand, and the poetical epitaph comjiosed, niion iier own death, by lier pastor, 
the lieverend Ileuricus Selyus, is still extant. 



238 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

jointly, ill 1643, a parcel of ground upon the east side of the 
present Broadway, about two hundred and seventy-five feet 
north of Beaver Street, — a large plot, of about one hundred 
feet front, and extending some two hundred and fifty feet 
down the hill towards the Broad Street swamp. What this 
property was used or designed for, whether for warehouse 
purposes or for speculation, or whether it was held to cover 
some indebtedness to these associates, does not appear. It is 
a curious fact that although Govert Loockermans was for 
many years engaged in mercantile ventures, we nowhere 
meet with any allusions to a warehouse owned by him; 
this may, indeed, have been located at his residence near the 
East River shore, the large size of the building rendering tliis 
quite probable, or it is possible that he may have made use 
of Allerton's large building at the present Pearl Street and 
Peck Slip. 

Loockermans was a bold and enterprising trader, careless 
of whose corns he trod upon, — metaphorically speaking, — 
in his pursuit of gain : ready, apparently, at any time to 
furnish the Indians with firearms, powder, and balls, in ex- 
change for their furs ; and declining to pennit any inter- 
ference in his business by persons of adverse interest. In 
1644, he had been up the Hudson, upon a trading voyage 
to the north, in the yacht, the " Good Hope," and on his 
return, when passing Bear's Island, below Albany, where the 
patroon Van Rensselaer had erected a small fortification which 
was guarded by one Nicholas Koorn, that individual, accord- 
ing to the story of several of the men of Loockermans' crew, 
" cried out to Govert Loockermans, when we were passing by : 
' Lower thy colors.' * For whom should I do so ? ' retorted 
Loockermans. Then Koorn replied : ' For the staple right of 
Rensselaerswyck.' Then Govert Loockermans answered, *I 
lower not the colors for any individual except for the Prince 
of Orange and the lords, my masters ; ' — when directly 
Nicholas Koorn fired a gun. The first shot went through 
the sail, broke the ropes and the ladder ; a second discharge 
passed over us; and the third, done by a savage, perforated 



LOOCKERMANS' VOYAGES 239 

our princely colors about a foot above the head of Loocker- 
mans, who kept constantly the colors in his hand; but we 
continued our course, notwithstanding this insulting assault, 
without returning the fire, or making any other reprisals 
whatever, and descended gently the river." Other witnesses, 
liowever, testified that Govert's demeanor was not quite so 
lamb-like, but that he cried out to Koorn and his men: 
" Fire, ye dogs ; and the devil take you ! " 

Loockermans' voyages extended all along the coast, from 
New England to Virginia, and at several places he acquired, 
at different times, large tracts of wild lands, as, for example, 
in Maryland, and at various points upon Long Island. On 
Manhattan Island he held also a number of parcels of ground, 
— notably, almost all the land lying between the present 
Ann Street and the Versche Water, or Fresh Water, — the 
little run of water forming one of the outlets of the Kolck 
jiond, and emptying into the East River near the present 
James Street. Most of Loockermans' transactions in New 
Amsterdam real estate are very difficult to trace, however, 
from a peculiarity he seems to have had of avoiding, as far 
as possible, the registry of his " ground-briefs," and much is 
discoverable only through allusions and recitals in other 
documents. 

For this reason, we cannot tell exactly when Loockermans 
acquired the large parcel of ground upon the present Hanover 
Square, where he resided for a great part of his life. It, or 
a portion of it, is recited to have been granted by the Dutch 
government in 1043, but whether to Loockermans or to 
some other person does not appear. There is evidence, how- 
ever, that the westerly portion of the land, embracing about 
one hundred and fifteen feet in frontage, and extending along 
Hanover Square nearly to the easterly line of the present 
Coffee Exchange, was originally granted either to Cornells 
Leendertsen, Loockermans' business associate (who died prior 
to 1646), or to Dirck Cornelissen, who appears to have been 
his son. The latter married, in 1646, Marritje Janse, widow 
of the ship-carpenter, Tymen Jansen, but died within two 



240 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

or three years ; liis widow marrying Govert Loockermans in 
1649, this property passed to the latter, in right of his wife. 
Dirck Cornelissen's liouse, which appears to have stood 
about on the western end of the present Coffee Exchange, 
was sold in 16G7 or 1668 to Reynhout Reynhoutsen by 
Loockermans. 

As to the easterly portion of Loockermans' land, which 
covered originally about one hundred and thirty feet front, 
unless he is the person (as it seems quite probable that he 
is) referred to as Govert Aertsen in a deed of 1645 from 
Dirck Volckertsen, we have no information as to how he 
acquired the land. The description given in that deed is as 
follows : " A house and lot, where Dirck Cornelissen next 
adjoins on the west side, and Jan Damen," — the so-called 
outhoek, — " on the east." No disposition of this parcel by 
Govert Aertsen can be found, and within two or three years 
from the last-mentioned date Loockermans is known to have 
been in possession of it. 

In whatever manner he had acquired it, however, we find 
Govert Loockermans, as early as 1649, in possession of this 
large parcel of ground, — nearly three hundred feet in front- 
age along the River Road, and part of it extending back 
nearly or quite to the present Wall Street. Here he seems 
to have at first established his residence in a house afterwards 
occupied by Daniel Litscho and subsequently by Andries 
Jochemsen as a tavern, the site of which is at present covered 
by No. 125 Pearl Street; but in a few years he had built 
a new residence for himself on a portion of his ground a 
Httle farther west along the road. This latter building ap- 
pears to have been a substantial edifice, of some size and 
pretensions, and is quite clearly shown upon the " Duke's 
Plan," supposed to represent the town as of the year 1661. 
As early as 1654 it was enclosed with a high wall, provided 
with a gate kept locked and barred by night : these particu- 
lars we learn from the prosecution of one Willemsen for 
burglary at this house in that year, as it was thought that 
he must have had confederates to help him climb the wall. 







Cr-^^ r-oJ^ /^sz> 



< r^ ^ 



■I 




~^;-ri>- 



"'^^i^ //^^ 






N 



1^ Mceg^ .^fr^^t (X>-/^e. aft Sront <^) 







THE LOOCKERMANS HOUSE 241 

It is the fact that Loockermans' house was thus protected, 
that leads to the conjecture that a portion of it may have 
been used as his warehouse. The site of this house is now 
occupied by the two unpretending buildings extending from 
the Coffee Exchange to the corner of the modern Hanover 
Street, and numbered 119 and 121 Pearl Street. 

There can be little doubt that this was the same building 
shown as occupying this spot in a plan made in the year 
1719. This building was, as has been said, of large, and, in 
fact, of unusually large, dimensions. It was of about tliirty- 
eight feet in front by forty-eight feet in depth ; and a kitchen 
extension of about twenty feet square upon its east side 
gives suggestions of quarters for the domestic slaves,^ as 
the size of the main building does of its partial use for 
warehouse purposes. Along the east side of the building 
ran, in the year last above mentioned, a narrow cartway, now 
forming a part of what is known as Hanover Street; and 
nearly a hundred feet in the rear of the house, upon the 
back lane called "the Sloot," or ditch, stood a capacious 
stable, or coach-house, some twenty by forty feet in size. 
It is quite likely, however, that this last structure was built 
aftei- Loockermans' time. 

Goveii: Loockermans' first wife had died before 1649, leav- 
ing him with two little daughters, Marritje and Jannetje, 
who were respectively about eight and six years of age at 
the period mentioned. Upon the 20th of July of that year 
he married, for his second wife, the widow, Marritje Janse. 
This lady had been the wife of Tymen Jansen, a ship car- 
penter in the employ of the West India Company, to whose 
liouse upon the present Pearl Street just north of Wall, we 
shall have occasion to allude hereafter. Tymen Jansen had 
been for several years from 1633 the principal shipwright 

^ In her will, made in 1677, Loockermans' widow Marritje provides for two of 
the slave " boys," Manuel and Francis. The former was to be freed at the age 
of twenty-five : as to the latter, she requires that her children " shall maintain 
him with dyett and clothing, and good discipline ; not willing, neither desiring 
that they should sell him alien and transport, neither to deliver him to the 
service of a stranger." Lib. 1, Wills, N. Y. Surr. OUice. 

16 



242 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

of the Company, at New Amsterdam, and had constructed 
many vessels here : he had died some years before 1649, 
however, leaving his widow with a daughter Elsie, known 
according to the system of nomenclature in use among the 
Netherlanders as Elsie Tymense, and who was about fifteen 
or sixteen years of age at the time of her mother's marriage 
to Govert Loockermans. Previous to this time, and in the 
year 1646, Marritje Janse had married Dirck Cornelissen of 
Wensveen, whose house and land upon the present Hanover 
Square has just been referred to. Cornelissen died a year or 
two after his marriage, leaving a son called Cornells Dircksen, 
an infant of about two years of age at the time of his 
mother's marriage to Loockermans. By his wife Marritje, 
Govert Loockermans had one child, Jacob, born in 1652, who 
in later years, following the English nomenclature, which 
was gradually adopted by the Dutch after the surrender to 
the English in 1664, was known as Jacob Loockermans. 
The above-named persons constituted the family of Govert 
Loockermans ; and out of their somewhat complicated rela- 
tionship grew, apparently, certain important consequences 
in after years. 

Elsie Tymense did not remain many years in her stepfather's 
house on the East River shore, for in the early part of 1652 
she married a well-to-do merchant, Pieter Cornelissen Van- 
derveen, from Amsterdam, and resided for a number of years 
in her husband's house, near the southwest corner of the 
present Pearl and Whitehall streets, where she was long a close 
neighbor of Director-General Stuyvesant and his family. 
Vanderveen having died about the year 1661, Elsie married 
Jacob Leisler, of Frankfurt,^ two years later, and he, who had 
come to New Amsterdam in the military service of the West 
India Company, — Mr. Valentine calls him an "officer," — 
now assumed the charge of her late husband's business, and 
soon became, himself, a leading merchant of the town. 

At his house upon the East River shore, (i overt Loocker- 

1 Wliether it was the city of that name upon the Ma3'n River, or that upon the 
Oder, does not appear. 



THE RIVER FRONT 243 

mans lived an active life for many years. He does not seem 
to have cared to mingle much in the politics of his day, though 
in 1647 he was one of the committee called " the Nine Men," 
chosen by the people, and who afterwards laid the grievances 
of the colonists before the authorities in the Netherlands. In 
1657 he also served one year as one of the city magistrates, or 
"schepens," and at the same time he also held the office of 
head or foreman of the fire company. He took an interest 
besides in the affairs of the city militia company, in which 
he was a lieutenant at the time of his death, under Captain 
Martin Cregier. 

It has been already stated that the Loockermans' house stood 
within somewhat spacious grounds ; about one hundred and 
fifty feet in its rear there was a wet depression, where there 
seems to have been at one time a small pond ; here a drain 
ditch was afterwards constructed, and this ditch, or " sloot," 
gave its name to a narrow lane which was in existence here 
before the year 1728, and was long known as " Sloat Lane." 
It is now covered by the extension of Beaver Street. Besides 
thus caring for his rear grounds, Loockermans had an eye to 
his fine river frontage. At an early day, he had built, at his 
own expense, a wall or piling all along the shore in front of his 
premises, in order to protect the bank. Towards the western 
end of his land and near Burger's Path, there was considerable 
ground lying between the road and the shore, and Loockermans 
made a petition to the Director-General and Council in 1656 
for a grant of this ground " on which in future some build- 
ing might be erected to the damage of petitioner." The 
ground was granted to him accordingly, with the reservation 
to the West India Company of the right to build a breastwork 
along the pihng. As has been previously stated, a good por- 
tion of it, covering the present Hanover Square, was over- 
grown with forest trees ; these were certainly in existence as 
late as 1679, for they are shown upon the very valuable sketch 
of the Labadists, Danker and Sluyter, in that year.^ Within 

1 This wooded bank, altliough a very conspicuous feature in any view of tlie 
East River shore of New Aiasterdaui, does uot appear in that group of views 



244 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

ten years from that period, however, the trees had probably all 
disappeared, and about the year 1690 the " Square" began to 
be built upon. A row of three or four houses of small size 
soon occupied the larger part of the ground, and this was used 
for building purposes until the early part of the last century, 
when the then existing buildings were destroyed, and the land 
thrown into the public thoroughfares about it. 

Govert Loockermans died in the year 1671. Before that 
time, his two daughters had been married, — the eldest, 
Marritje, to Balthazar Bayard, a nephew of Director-General 
Stuyvesant, in 1664 ; and Jannetje to Hans, the son of 
Dr. Hans Kiersted, in 1667. Govert's son, Jacob, who was 
about nineteen years of age at his father's death, continued to 
i-eside for some years witli his mother at the homestead, but after 
lier death, in 1677, he took up his residence in the Province of 
Maryland, succeeding to the estates of his father there. He 
had pursued the study of medicine, and was a practising 
" chyrurgeon '' in that colony, residing, according to Valentine, 
at St. Mary's, in the soutliern part of the State. He appears, 
however, afterwards as a magistrate of Dorchester County, 
upon tlie eastern shore of Chesapeake Bay. 

There are not wanting indications of a lack of harmony in 
the Loockermans family at an early date. When Govert 
Loockermans died intestate, in 1671, under the English law 
of descent his son Jacob became the heir to his father's con- 
siderable landed estate ; Jacob's half-brother, Cornells Dircksen, 

which, under various uames, such as the " AUaerdt " and the " Seutter " views, 
etc. (from the names of the publishers in whose works they are to be found), 
represent substantially one and the same sketch, and that taken at a period some 
years earlier than the one of the Lahadists, — probably at some time between 
1667 and 1669. The reason for this is quite obvious. If tlie grove had been 
represented in true perspective, it would have concealed from sight a number of 
houses which the artists desired to make appear in their views of the town. The 
Labadists resorted to the expedient of dwarfing the grove, while the other 
draughtsman omitted it altogether from his view, afterwards supplying the houses 
from some sketch taken from anotlter point, with the result of lamentably distort- 
ing the perspective of the wliole view, and rendering it unquestionably and grossly 
inaccurate. It is composed indeed, in all probability, of several distinct sections 
thus patched together. 



JACOB LEISLER 245 

died young,^ and he also inherited an estate from liim. Jacob 
appears to have been much more under the influence of Elsie 
Leisler, his half-sister upon his mother's side, than under that 
of his half-sisters upon his father's side ; and in 1679, he being 
then, as stated, a resident of Maryland, he conveyed to Elsie's 
husband, Jacob Leisler, all his right to the estate in tlie 
Province of New York of Govert Loockermans, his father, 
as well as his right to all that which had come to him through 
his mother — or rather through his half-brother, Cornells 
Dircksen — from her former husband, Dirck Cornelissen. 
Nearly the whole estate of Govert Loockermans and of his 
wife hiid thus come into the hands of his step-daughter Elsie.''^ 
It is foreign to the purposes of this work to treat at much 
length of the occurrences which led to the condemnation and 
execution for treason, on the 16th of May, 1691, of Jacob 
Leisler, and of liis son-in-law, Jacob jNIilborne.^ It may be 
sufficient to recall to mind the fact that upon hearing of the 
Revolution of 1689 in England, which had driven James II. 
from the throne and replaced him by his daughter Mary and 
by her royal consort William, Prince of Orange, Governor 
Dongan of New York abandoned his government of the 
colony and sailed for England. The question of the day then 
became, who was to take charge of the affairs of the colony ? 
At this early period the principles came into play which after- 

^ Cornelis Dircksen died in the early part of the year 1678, very soon after the 
death of his mother. 

2 It is true that iu several conveyances of portions of the Govert Loockermans' 
estate, made within a few years after his death, the two daughters join as parties; 
but it seems evident that tliis was done either by reason of some agreement for the 
purpose of quieting dissension, or else to satisfy purchasers who had raised objec- 
tions growing out of the obscure or ambiguous clause in the Articles of Surrender 
in 1664, tiiat the Dutcli "shall enjoy their ownecustomes concerning their inlierit- 
ances." In later conveyances, we find no attention paid to the daughters. It may 
be further mentioned, in this connection, tliat while Govert Loockermans' widow, 
Marritje, in her will, executed in 1677, bequeaths various articles of jewelry and 
other keepsakes to her own children and grandchildren, no mention whatever is 
made of her two step-daughters. 

^ A lucid account of this matter will be found iu Chapter XV. of Mr. D. T. 
Valentine's " History of New York." 



246 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

wards formed the foundation of the controversy which termi- 
nated in the American Revolution, On the one hand was the 
party of Legality, whose doctrine was that the colonies, being 
sunple dependencies of the Crown of England, with their local 
administrations fixed by the Central Government at London, 
those administrations ought to continue until they were 
changed by that Central Government, and tliat consequently, 
in the present case, the control of affairs, in the absence of 
instructions from England, ought to remain with the Lieuten- 
ant-Governor, Francis Nicholson, and the former Council. 
Prominent among the men of this party were Colonel Nicholas 
Bayard, the brother-in-law of Marritje Loockermans, and 
Stephanus van Cortlandt, her cousin, the son of Govert 
Loockermans' sister Anneken. 

The other party was the party of Expediency ; they con- 
sidered that the management of their own affairs ought to 
belong to the people of the colony. They were not prepared 
as yet to assert that they " are and of right ought to be " free 
and independent, but they determined to take possession of 
what they considered the vacant government. They contrived 
to oust their opponents, and by means of a self-appointed 
" Committee of Safety," usually resorted to in similar cases, 
they conferred the chief power upon their leading man, Jacob 
Leisler. The legality of this action was of course denied 
by the opposite party, and in asserting and maintaining his 
authority, Leisler acted with but little discretion. In spite of 
the frail nature of his power, he affected to consider his 
opponents as rebels and traitors, drove the leaders among them 
from the colony, and confiscated the estates of several of them, 
and upon their subsequent return to New York he threw 
Bayard into prison, where he remained for over a year ; while 
Stephanus van Cortlandt succeeded in making his escape 
from the officers armed with a warrant for his arrest for high 
treason. 

When, finally, in March, 1691, the new governor, Colonel 
Henry Sloughter, arrived from England, Leisler succeeded, by 
his punctilios about delivering over the government into the 



THE EXECUTIONS 247 

hands of Sloughter, in creating a hostile feeling in the mem- 
bers of the new administration; they immediately inclined 
towards the party of Leisler's opponents, and his arrest, trial, 
condemnation, and execution for treason followed, together 
with the similar process in the case of his son-in-law, Jacob 
Milborne. 

The malignant haste, however, with which these prose- 
cutions were urged, and the precipitation with which the 
sentences w^ere carried out, takes away all merit from the 
proceedings, and leaves them mere judicial murders. As 
Leisler's seizure of power — technically illegal, no doubt 
— ■ was unquestionably made for and in behalf of the reigning 
sovereigns William and Mary, every one concerned in the 
prosecution of the prisoners knew perfectly well that William 
and Mary would never have permitted them to be punished 
as traitors if the case had reached them in any proper way. 
However exasperating Leisler's acts had been to his enemies, 
there were other remedies to redress such wrongs as they 
had suffered; their e^ddent malice deprived them of any 
sympathy from the great body of the people, by whom they 
were looked upon in no other light than as murderers, while 
their victims were glorified as heroes and martyrs. 

As for Elsie Leisler and her children, the blow fell upon 
them with crushing force. Four years afterwards the Eng- 
lish Parliament reversed the attainder for treason of Leisler 
and Milborne, and restored their confiscated property to their 
heirs ; but most of the joy of life had departed for Elsie 
Leisler. Always she could see before her that dark May 
morning, with the rain pouring down upon the scaffold and 
the angry or pitying crowd around it, and could hear the 
words of her son-in-law : " We are thoroughly wet with rain, 
but in a little time we shall be washed with the Holy Spirit," 
or those of her husband, as the handkerchief was bound about 
his head : " I hope my eyes shall see our Lord Jesus Christ 
in heaven ; I am ready ! I am ready ! " 

"Her family misfortunes," says Valentine, speaking of 
Mrs. Leisler, "surrounded her with sympathetic neighbors, 



248 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

but she maintained a reserved and humble deportment, mix- 
ing but little with the world, and confining herself to her 
own domestic sphere." Tliat her troubles had endeared her 
to her children is well attested, across two centuries of time, 
by so prosaic an evidence as the time-stained records in the 
New York Register's office, wherein, on the 19th of July, 
1699, Jacob Leisler, the younger, appoints as his 'attorney- 
in-fact, "his dear and affectionate mother, Elsie Leisler, 
widdow." ^ 

The Loockermans' homestead upon the present Hanover 
Square had passed out of the hands of that family some 
years before the struggle between the Leislerian and the anti- 
Leislerian factions took place. Although somewhat outside 
of the plan of our survey, it may be of some interest to follow 
the subsequent history of this property for a short period. 
What remained of it, — for several parcels had been previ- 
ously sold off from time to time — came, within a short time 
after the death, in 1677 or 1678, of Marritje, the widow of 
Govert Loockermans, into the hands of one John Robinson, 
who purchased the family residence. This man was a mer- 
chant of New York, who was interested in the export of 
flour, and who, at the time he acquired the Loockermans' 
homestead, was engaged in the construction of a flour-mill 
upon the small stream known as the Sawkill, which emptied 
into the East River about at the foot of the present Seventy- 
fourth Street, along which stream he had a farm of nearly 
forty acres carved out of the forest.^ There he became in 

1 See Liber XXII. of Conveyances, page 323. 

" Mr. D. T. Valentine, having read in tlip "Journal " of Rev. Charles Woolley, 
who visited New York abont 1679, an account of a bear having been " treed " in 
or near an orchard belonging to John Robinson (with whom Woolley was connected 
either by relationship or by business interests), — and apparently not having ob- 
served that John Robinson's farm lay in the midst of the then unbroken forest 
along the East River shore, where the presence of a bear at that time was no 
great marvel, — has calmly proceeded in some of his historical writings to transfer 
the bear hunt to the immediate vicinity of the house and sm.all parcel of land 
belonging to Robinson near the present Hanover Square. Mr. Valentine has not 
only conducted his bear through three or four miles of open farming country 
into the heart of a good-sized town, and led the animal over the town ditch and 



WILLIAM COX 249 

some way connected in business dealings with William Cox 
to whom on February 12, 1684, he sold a half-interest in his 
mill and farm. 

William Cox was in some respects a singular character, 
about whose history not very much is known. He seems to 
have been a young man with considerable means, who had ap- 
parently been in New York for some little time prior to 
1683, for in that year he was an alderman of the city. With 
him, in the city, resided his mother, whom he, as well as she 
herself, calls by the curious appellation of " Alice Cox, alias 
Bono." ^ As to his business, he called himself sometimes a 
merchant, and at other times a " bolter," from his milling 
operations. 

In 1685, William Cox married a young woman who was 
destined to figure more prominently in the affairs of the day 
than she could have desired. She was Sarah, the daughter of 
Captain Thomas Bradley, who with her father and her young 
brothers Samuel and Henry had come over from England and 
taken up their residence in New York. She is said to have 
been handsome and dashing, but was rather illiterate, for in 
various documents executed by her in her earlier years she 
makes her mark in the signature, — though not so in after 
years. 

On the 21st of January, 1688 (N. S.), Wilham Cox bought 
from John Robinson his house and ground previously spoken 
of upon the present Hanover Square, being the former Loock- 
ermans' homestead ; Cox himself may never have resided in 
this house, for in about a year from this time we find him 
purchasing another house upon the north side of Wall Street, 
which street was then beginning to be built up with a better 

palisades into a non-existent orcharfl, but, what is worse, lie has afforded an 
opportunity to some of the writers who have followed him, for some very pain- 
fully elaborated attempts at witticisms respecting Mr. Valentine's bear and the 
" bears " of the supposed neighboring Wall Street. 

1 By the will of this lady, bearing date June 13, 1694, she bequeaths to her 
" dearly beloved brother, Mr. Robert Blackburnc, dry-fish monger in London," 
the sum of .£100. The rest of her estate she gives to John Theobalds, one of 
her executors, " to dispose of tlie same to his children, or to whomsoever he 
pleaseth." (Sec Will, N, Y. Surrogate's office.) 



250 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

class of houses than had previously been found there, and in 
this latter dwelling he unquestionably resided during the 
short remainder of his life. 

It was in the summer of the year 1689 that the community 
was in a ferment over the action of Jacob Leisler and his 
party in seizing upon the government of the colony; Wil- 
liam Cox became a prominent supporter of Leisler, was 
one of the so-called " Committee of Safety " of the Leisler- 
ians, and lost his life about August, 1689, while engaged upon 
the business of his chief. The account of this aiTair is given 
with considerable flippancy by John Tuder, Cox's political 
enemy (afterwards recorder of the city), in a letter, dated 
August — , 1689, to Captain Nicholson, the ousted Lieutenant- 
Governor : — 

" Mr. Cox, to show his fine deaths, undertooke to gee to Amboy 
to proclaime the King, who coming whome againe, was fairely 
drowned, which accident startled our commanders here very much : 
there is a good rich widdow left. The manner of his being 
drowned was comeing on board in a cannow from Capt" Cornelis' 
Point at Staten Islands, goeing into the boate, slipt downe be- 
twixt the cannow and the boate, the water not being above his 
chinn, but very muddy, stuck fast in, and striving to get out, 
bobbing his head under, receaved to much water in. They 
brought him ashore with life in him, but all would not fetch him 
againe." 

The " good rich widdow " did not remain a widow long, 
for in a very short time she married John Oort, who is some- 
times spoken of as a merchant, and at others as a ship cap- 
tain, but his married life was of sliort duration. The fact is, 
that among this little coterie of English merchants and cap- 
tains and their famihes, events succeeded one another with 
bewildering rapidity. On the 15th of July, 1689, William 
Cox, then apparently in full healtli and vigor, executed his 
last will and testament, and on the 9th of August following, 
after the unfortunate occurrence whereby he had " receaved 
to much water in," his will was admitted to probate. By 



WILLIAM COX'S WILL 251 

the I5th of May, 1691, Sarah Oort had about finished her 
mourning for both her deceased husbands, for upon that day 
she took out letters of administration upon the estate of the 
late John Oort; while upon the next day, the 16th of May, a 
license was issued, under the forms of the colonial law, for 
her marriage to Captain William Kidd. 

The newly married couple resided for several years in the 
house which Mrs. Kidd's first husband, William Cox, had 
purchased, upon the present Pearl Street. This house had 
passed to Cox's widow by virtue of a very curious provision 
in the mil of her husband. In the first part of this document 
Cox appears to have designed the house in question for his 
wife's brother : " I give to Samuel Bradley, my brother-in- 
law, my other house, which I bought of Mr. John Robinson, 
or this house which I now live in,^ my wife taking her first 
choice, and God sending my brother-in-law an heyre, that he 
call his name Cox Bradley " : later the testator remembers 
a moral obligation which he considers himself under, and con- 
tinues : " My desire is that this house where I now dwell in 
shall be for my brother Samuel and his heyres as above 
expressed, by reason of fulfilling an oath formerly solemnly 
sworne to my mother, she forcing me to passion, in fulfilling 
whereof I desire that tJiere may be no contention after my 
decease, concerning ye said house." After making several 
bequests to his mother, and to others. Cox left the remainder, 
being a considerable estate, to his wife Sarah, — the goods 
in his store were alone inventoried at 1900?., — so that the 
stories about her later husband, Captain William Kidd, be- 
ing a needy adventurer, when he started out upon his fatal 
voyage in the " Adventure " galley, five years later, are quite 
false. 

The tendency of modern historical criticism — at any rate 
among American writers — is not to regard William Kidd as 
the Raw-Head-and-Bloody-Bones which he was once popularly 
considered, but to look upon him as having been to a consider- 

1 Upon the north siile of Wall Street. 



252 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

able extent a vicarious sacrifice to save the reputation of men 
occupying a great deal liigher station than himself. 

If, at the present day, the President of the United States, 
together with the Secretary of State, and three or four more 
members of the Cabinet and governors of States or Territories, 
should agree, in private conference, that inasmuch as thefts, 
highway robberies, and train robberies, kidnapping, and other 
crimes of violence had increased to an intolerable degree 
within the territories of the United States, but that on 
account of the oppressive taxation necessary to support the 
military operations of the country in various quarters of the 
globe, no further demands ought to be made or could safely be 
made upon the heavily burdened people ; and should there- 
upon form an association — each one contributing a certain 
amount of money to it — for the purpose of equipping a pri- 
vate armed force to arrest or to destroy the outlaws, and stipu- 
lating that each one of the association should receive a certain 
proportion of the money and effects to be taken from such 
outlaws ; if in addition to this, it should be agreed that the 
leader of this force, as well as the men under his command, 
were themselves to receive no compensation for their services 
except a further proportion of the effects of the alleged law- 
breakers, — if all this were to be done, it is very certain that a 
general chorus of animadversion would be raised, not only by 
the opposite political party in this country, but by all the 
civilized nations of the earth. 

This, however, is substantially what was done in England 
in the year 1695. In the course of the wars between France 
and England, piracy had greatly increased upon the seas, much 
to the disturbance of the English, who looked upon the crime 
in an altogether different light when it was carried on against 
their commerce than when it was maintained (largely by 
themselves) against the Spanish. William III. was particu- 
larly anxious to have the pirates suppressed, and as they were 
supposed to have a good deal of support in the American 
colonies, and especially in New York, the king had selected 
Richard Coote, Earl of Bellamont, as Governor of New York, 



BELLAMONT'S SCHEME 253 

to supplant Colonel Benjamin Fletcher, and had given him 
special instructions to operate against the pirates. It now 
became a question how these operations against the pirates 
should be carried on : the government, deeply involved in the 
war with France, could spare neither ships, men, nor money ; 
but the Earl of Bellamont, in conjunction with Robert 
Livingston of New York (who is said to have been the origina- 
tor of the scheme), formed a plan for sending out a private 
expedition, under warrant from the English government. 
For the commander of this expedition, Bellamont and Living- 
ston fixed upon Captain William Kidd, who had now been 
living for about four years in the house at the present 
Hanover Square in New York. Kidd, who is said to have been 
a native of Greenock, at the mouth of the Clyde River in 
Scotland (then a mere village of fishers), was about thirty-five 
years of age at this time, a careful and experienced sea-captain 
of good repute, who as early as 1691 had served with dis- 
tinction against the French. Kidd was also familiar with the 
haunts of the pirates, and had sanguine views about the ease 
with which he could capture them. 

Having submitted their plan to the king, and received his 
sanction, articles of agreement were drawn up on the 10th of 
October, 1695, between the Earl of Bellamont and Kidd, 
whereby Bellamont undertakes to procure, from the king or 
from the commissioners of Admiralt}^ commissions to Kidd to 
fight the king's enemies or pirates, and also agi-ees to furnish 
four-fifths of the cost of buying and fitting up a proper ves- 
sel, the remaining fifth being furnished by Kidd and Living- 
ston together. Kidd on his part agrees to take such prizes as 
he can, and forthwith to make the best of his way to Boston to 
condemn them, " without touching at any other place whatso- 
ever," and he further agrees to enlist his men, " no purchase, 
no pay," — that is, they must look to their prizes for compen- 
sation. Both Kidd and Livingston entered into bonds for a 
considerable amount to secure their part of the undertaking. 
As for the Earl of Bellamont' s share, it was in part made up, 
in sums of about .£1000 each, by the following distinguished 



254 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

partners : Lord John Somers, Keeper of the Great Seal ; 
the Earl of Romney, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland; the Earl 
of Shrewsbury, Secretary of State; and the Earl of Or- 
ford, First Lord of the Admiralty. One tenth part was 
to be reserved for the king, in token of his approval of the 
scheme. Kidd was thereupon granted two commissions, one 
bearing date December 10, 1695, an ordinary commission to 
act against the French ; the other an extraordinary one 
dated 26th January, 1695-96, to apprehend and seize all 
pirates. 

The dangers of admitting a large body of sailors into this 
sort of speculation, by making their pay contingent upon 
their success, were fully realized in England. Sir Edmund 
Harrison, who was one of the contributors to the enterprise, 
took care, — as we are informed in the pamphlet upon the 
Kidd Case, known as " Letters from a Person of Quality," etc. 
(avowedly written in the interest of the Earl of Bellamont) 
— that every one of Kidd's officers, and almost all the seamen, 
had settled families in England : " true it is, this last care 
was in a great degree rendered ineffectual, for most of his crew 
were pressed into the King's service before he got out of the 
river." Of course it is incredible that Kidd should not have 
complained of this interference with his commission ; the act 
was evidently notorious ; the intervention of the king or of the 
First Lord of the Admiralty, both of whom were partners 
with Kidd in tliis enterprise, would undoubtedly have been 
sufficient to restore these picked men at once ; and Kidd 
lingered at Plymouth until April, 1696, and yet he was per- 
mitted by those in power to depart on such an errand as his 
with hardly any men, and without the prospect of getting 
any except the unstable characters whom he might succeed in 
alluring into his service in the colonies. He sailed finally for 
New York with liis ship, the now notorious " Adventure " 
galley, and at that port he filled out his complement of men. 
Of their character the English government was fully informed 
by a letter from Governor Benjamin Fletcher to the Lords 



CAPTAIN KIDD AND HIS CREW 255 

of Trade in England : ^ " One Captain Kidd lately arrived 
here, and produced a commission under the Great Seal of 
England, for suppressing of piracy. When he was here 
many flocked to him from all parts, men of desperate fortunes 
and necessitous, in expectation of getting vast treasure. . . . 
It is generally believed here they will have money joer /as ant 
nefas ; that if he miss of the design intended, for which he 
has commission, 't will not be in Kidd's power to govern such 
a hord of men, under no pay." 

In July, 1696, Kidd sailed from New York for the Straits 
of Madagascar. From this time, for more than a year and a 
half, we have no accurate knowledge of what took place on 
the " Adventure " galley. Kidd's own full statement was never 
allowed to be made public, but even from the one-sided testi- 
mony produced upon the so-called " trials " of the indictments 
against him (taken in conjunction with a few known facts), 
there is the strongest evidence that what had been anticipated 
actually occurred. The partners in this enterprise had been 
too sanguine. Such pirates as were upon the seas kept care- 
fully out of Kidd's way, and French prizes were few and far 
between. The lawless characters composing the greater part of 
the crew of the " Adventure " became enraged at their ill-luck, 
and at the failure of Kidd's promises to them ; they mutinied 
about the month of September, 1697, and from that time for a 
period of about four months, Kidd appears to have been prac- 
tically a prisoner in the hands of his rebellious crew. Their 
ascendancy over him was greatly enhanced soon after the 
above-named date by an unfortunate occurrence, whereby 
Kidd, in a fit of passion, struck with a water bucket one of 
the mutineers named William jMoore in such a manner that 
he died within a day or two from the effects of the 
blow.^ 



^ The letter will be found in 4 Col. Doc, p. 275. It is not dated, but must 
have been written in the latter part of 1696. 

^ Kidd, as is well known, was tried at the Old Bailey upon an indictment for 
the killing of this man. The trial took place at the same time with the trials of 
the indictments for piracy. The witnesses for the government were the same two 



256 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

Within the period of four months, above mentioned, five or 
six vessels are stated in the indictments and in the testimony 
taken thereupon to have been captured by the " Adventure " 
galley. Most of these were Arabian or " Moorish " coasters 
of the most insignificant size and value, one of them, of fifty 
tons' burden, yielded a little coffee and sugar, and " some sugar 
candy ; " out of another, some coffee, pepper, and myrrh, worth 

persons made use of as State's evidence in the piracy trials, — the mutineer, 
Joseph Palmer, and the drunken surgeon, Robert Bradinham. Kidd had no 
witnesses for his defence except those members of his crew who had been 
brought with him under arrest, from America to England. In the piracy 
trials their mouths were closed in his behalf, for they were jointly indicted with 
him ; but in the murder trial, he was allowed to call them as witnesses. Un- 
fortunately, however, they had seen little or notliing of the occurrence. Kidd, 
it must be remembered, under the criminal procedure of that period, was not 
allowed to testify in his own behalf. The respective trials for murder and for 
piracy throw much light one upon another. It appears that about a fortnight 
before the killing of William Moore, Kidd had fallen in with a vessel called the 
" Loyal Captain," which he had allowed to proceed upon its way, to the great 
dissatisfaction of his crew; the sailor, Moore, it seems, had been charged with 
exciting discontent among the others, by going about among them, saying that 
if the captain would have listened to him, he could have taken the vessel, with- 
out incurring any liability. Tlie story of the killing, as given by the witness 
Palmer, was this : " Captain Kidd came and walked on the deck, and walks by 
this Moore, and when he came to him says, ' wliich way could you have put me 
in a way to take the ship and been clear ? ' ' Sir,' says William Moore, ' I never 
spoke such a word, nor ever thought such a thing,' upon which Captain Kidd 
called him a ' lousy dog,' and says William Moore, ' If I am a lousy dog, you 
have made me so ; you have brought me to ruin and many more ' — upon his 
saying this, says Captain Kidd, ' Have I ruined you, ye dog ? ' and took a bucket 
bound with iron hoops, and struck him on the right side of the head, of which 
he died the next day." 

Macaulay, writing up the glories of his idolized William III. and of Lord John 
Somers, tells of the " agony of remorse " with which William Moore uttered the 
above remark. If one can shake off the charm of the great historian's pictur- 
esque .style long enough to examine critically his remarkably inaccurate account 
of this affair, he will be apt to conclude, — inasmuch as the occurrence took place be- 
fore the alleged piratical depredations of the " Adventure " galley, — that William 
Moore's remark to his captain was made mucli more in a spirit of surly reproach 
for having been induced by him to enter an unremunerative service than in any 
"agony of remorse." As for William Moore himself, he appears to have been 
previously in trouble, and under arrest in New York upon sever.al occasions, for 
difficulties between himself and his superior officers. (Vide Colonial MSS., 
N. Y. State Library.) 



KIDD'S ALLEGED PIRACIES 257 

about flOO, were taken on board the "Adventure," and the 
vessel then was allowed to proceed upon its way ; this was 
the earhest act of piracy charged, and as it is hardly credible 
that these trifles formed the whole cargo of the " Moorish " 
vessel, they may have been nothing more than the private 
property of a Portuguese who was transferred at this time 
to the " Adventure," to act as an interpreter ; no cross-exam- 
ination by counsel, upon the trials, was permitted to throw 
any light upon these matters. As to the other captures, one 
or two of them were made by boats' crews, and the whole 
series of them seems to be much more the work of a lawless 
gang of ruffians, ready to take anything that came in their 
way, than that of an experienced sea-captain, who was not 
laboring under any suspicions of lunacy. 

On the 27th of November, 1697, the " Adventure " captured 
off Surat a Moorish ship, which, according to Kidd's claim, 
was sailing under French papers. This of course he was 
justified in seizing under his commission, and it then became 
his duty to have taken her at once to Boston, in pursuance 
of his agreement with Bellamont, to have her condemned in 
a prize court. The vessel and her cargo, however, were of 
but little value, and the crew, as was further claimed by 
Kidd (and vdth great probability of truth), refused to waste 
so many months on a voyage from the Persian Gulf to 
Boston ; the few articles of value of this vessel's cargo seem 
to have been taken possession of by the " Adventure's " 
men, and some of them carried on shore and sold at dif- 
ferent points along the coast. 

On the 30th of Januaiy, 1698 (N. S.), however, the " Ad- 
venture " captured a prize of a different character. This was 
the famous " Quedagh " or " Quiddah " merchant. She was 
sailing with French papers, as was claimed by Kidd, and her 
cargo, of which a large part belonged to some Armenian mer- 
chants, was a very valuable one. Kidd's crew were no more 
disposed to sail to Boston with this prize than with the 
others. They had already done enough in the way of mutiny 
and piracy to bring them into the most imminent danger of 

17 



258 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

their lives, but they had now in their liands enough to com- 
pensate them for the risks they had run. A goodly portion 
of the valuable cargo of the " Quedagh " was sold, in what 
manner we have no definite information, at various points 
upon the coasts of India ; the " Adventure's " crew divided 
among themselves a large amount of money obtained in this 
way ; and then the greater portion of the men, being nearly 
a hundred in number, abandoned the vessels, went on shore 
with their gains, and dispersed themselves in such directions 
as they thought best. 

There remained now about fifty men with Kidd, and with 
these he started to return to the American colonies. The 
" Adventure " having become leaky, it was abandoned, and 
Kidd and his crew sailed in the " Quedagh " mercliant, and 
seem to have arrived in the West Indies in the latter part 
of 1698, or in the early part of 1699. 

In the mean time, reports of the work of the " Adventure " 
galley reached England, and excited great consternation 
among Captain Kidd's distinguished partners. Political ani- 
mosities ran high at this time, and the party opposed to the 
government eagerly seized upon this piece of scandal for 
political capital. Vigorous measures of some kind had to 
be taken by the administration, and accordingly, upon the 
16th of December, 1698, before any definite or trustworthy 
account of Captain Kidd's doings could possibly have reached 
England, a proclamation was issued by the English govern- 
ment, offering a pardon to all persons guilty of piratical 
practices, who should surrender themselves before a certain 
date to commissioners named for that purpose. From the 
benefit of this proclamation, Captain William Kidd was ex- 
pressly excluded. 

It is uncertain whether or not Kidd first heard of this 
proclamation in the West Indies, though it seems quite 
probable that he did. Under any circumstances, and whether 
guilty or innocent, he had to anticipate much trouble ahead 
for himself ; and it was probably from this reason that he 
seems to have adopted an expedient the practical effect of 



KIDD RETURNS TO NEW YORK 259 

wliicli has been to obscure both his own conduct and that 
of the high-pkced parties with whom he was associated, 
but which — though ill-judged — is not incompatible with 
liis own innocence of the main charges against him. 

This expedient was to retain, or to give the impression that 
he retained, upon his surrender of himself to the government, 
a sufficient security under his own control, to enable him to 
force the government to grant him the immunity from prose- 
cution or the pardon, to wliich he claimed to be entitled. 

Accordingly, leaving his vessel and what remained of her 
cargo (and this was of great value, according to his asser- 
tion) under the care of a small guard at some undisclosed 
place in the West Indies, Kidd with forty or fifty of his men 
made their appearance in the early part of 1699, in a small 
coasting vessel in the vicinity of New York, and after de- 
positing certain valuables upon Gardiner's Island, and at one 
or two other points, the captain opened communications, 
through Mr. James Emott, a New York attorney, with 
Lord Bellamont, who was then at Boston, he being Governor 
of Massachusetts as well as of New York. Kidd's proposi- 
tion was a simple one. He offered to turn over to Lord 
Bellamont and to the government the " Quedagh " merchant 
and such part of the cargo and of the proceeds thereof as 
remained in his hands, upon receiving a pardon and indem- 
nity against loss on the bond which he had given. With his 
communication to Lord Bellamont, Kidd sent, by his agent 
Emott, as announced by Bellamont to the Council in Boston, 
" two French papers, found in two ships taken by said Kidds 
Co., by violence against his will." 

There is little question that at this stage of the affair, Bel- 
lamont accepted Kidd's version of the transactions which had 
taken place, and wished to accept his proposition. " I make 
no doubt," he writes to Kidd, " but to obtain the king's par- 
don for you and those few men you have left, who, I under- 
stand, have been faithful to you and refused, as well as you, 
to dishonor the commission you had from England." After- 
wards, when it became evident that Kidd was to be sacrificed 



260 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

to the interests of the Whig administration, it suited Bella- 
mont to proclaim that his letter to Kidd had been merely a 
lying one. In a letter from New York to Secretary Vernon, 
dated December 6, 1700, he says: "When I writ that letter 
to Kid by Burgesse, I had an account that he was certainly 
turned pyrate ; and then I could not be blamed to have a 
just indignation against him, and to try by all means to get 
him into my hands, and 't is plain menacing him had not been 
the way to invite him hither, but rather wheedling, and that 
way I took, and after that manner I got him at last into Bos- 
ton, when I secured him." 

Whatever Bellamont's motives may have been, and under 
whatever orders, if any, from the English government he may 
have been acting, it is certain that Kidd, soon after his land- 
ing at Boston, was placed under arrest and sent to England. 
There he remained in prison, without being brought to trial, 
from the summer of 1699 till May, 1701, — nearly two years. 
What the reasons were for this delay, we do not know ; they 
may have arisen from an attempt to extort from Kidd his 
secret as to the alleged wealth he had concealed ; or there 
may have been compunction about carrying out the punish- 
ment of Kidd ; or perhaps the opposition party did not allow 
the government a free hand ; in the absence of authentic in- 
formation, we can only surmise. 

Just at this point, the criminality of Lord Somers and of his 
associates — not excepting the king — commences. It was 
of course evident that if Kidd was not to be punished, there 
was scarcely a possibility that any of his mutinous crew, by 
that time scattered all over the globe, would ever be brought 
to punishment, and the scandal of the " Adventure's " doings 
would remain, as a perpetual reproach to the Whig adminis- 
tration, and a menace to the not too firmly established Prot- 
estant succession to the English throne. 

Two courses were open to the administration : one was to 
examine carefully and impartially Kidd's story, and if it 
were found to be true to acquit him, and they themselves 
to assume the opprobrium of their ill-advised and indecent 



TRIAL OF CAPTAIN KIDD 261 

(though not criminal) speculative enterprise; the other 
course was to convict Kidd, and then to pose as the victims 
of a wicked deceiver, — they seem to have chosen the latter 
course. 

Few persons can read the accounts of the trials of Kidd 
and of his associates at the Old Bailey, on the 8th and 9bh of 
May, 1701, without a feeling of pain and disgust. The trial 
of Kidd for the murder of William Moore ; and the trials of 
Kidd and of half a score of the seamen of his crew on six 
separate indictments for piracy, — all took place within those 
two days. In a matter of such sujjreme importance, no 
counsel was allowed to the prisoners, although Doctor (in the 
Civil Law) Oldish and Mr. Proctor Lemmon stood ready in the 
court room to appear for Kidd. It had been only a short time 
before when the young Lord Ashley, rising in Parliament to 
speak in favor of the bill then pending, which allowed coun- 
sel to persons tried upon charges of treason, lost his control 
and was for a short time unable to proceed ; then recover- 
ing himself, he said : " How can I, Sir, produce a stronger 
argument in favour of this bill than my own failure ? My 
fortune, my character, my life, are not at stake. I am speak- 
ing to an audience whose kindness might well inspire me 
with courage. And yet, from mere nervousness, from mere 
want of practice in addressing large assemblies, I have lost 
my recollection. I am unable to go on with my argument. 
How helpless then must be a poor man, who, never having 
opened his lips in public, is called upon to reply without a 
moment's preparation to the ablest and most experienced ad- 
vocates in the kingdom, and whose faculties are paralysed by 
the thought that, if he fails to convince his hearers, he will 
in a few hours die on the gallows, and leave beggary and in- 
famy to those who are dearest to him ! " 

Lord Ashley's speech had created a great impression in 
England at the time, but it does not seem to have made 
much impression upon the judges of the court which tried 
William Kidd. They were less loud-mouthed, it is true, than 
their predecessor, the bawling monster, Jeffreys, whose memory 



262 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

was still fresh and hideous among men, but otherwise his 
mantle seems to have fallen upon worthy shoulders. They give 
the impression that they were men appointed to perform an 
unsavory piece of work, and who had made up their minds to 
go stoutly through with it. Even the understrapper, clerk of 
the arraignments, was permitted to take a hand in the brow- 
beating. A specimen extract or two from the court proceed- 
ings may be not without interest.^ The prisoners had been 
brought into court to plead to the indictments : 

" Cl. Arr. William Kidd, hold up thy hand. 

KiDD. May it please your Lordships, I desire you to permit me 
to have counsel. 

Recorder (Sir Salathiel Lovell). What would you have counsel 
for? 

Kidd. My Lord, I have some matter of law relating to the 
indictment, and I desire I may have counsel to speak to it. 

Dr. Oxenden. What matter of law can you have? 

Cl. Arr. How does he know what it is he is charged with? I 
have not told him. 

Recorder. Mr. Kidd, do you know what you mean by matter 
of law? 

Kidd. I know what I mean. I desire to put off my trial as 
long as I can, till I can get my evidence ready. 

Rec. Mr. Kidd, you had best mention the matter of law you 
would insist on. 

Kidd. I desire your Lordship's favor. I desire Dr. Oldish and 
Mr. Lemmon may be heard as to my case. 

Cl. Arr. What can he have counsel for before he has 
pleaded? . . . 

Kidd. I beg your Lordships' patience till I can procure my 
papers. I had a couple of French passes, which I must make use 
of in order to my justification. 

^ Kidd was undoubtedly, as he mournfully exclaimed in the court-room, 
" without money and without friends." The aim of the Tory opposition party 
was to have him convicted of piracy, and to fasten guilty knowledge of his pir- 
atical designs upon the government, — not at all to have him acquitted. 



KIDD DEPRIVED OF COUNSEL 263 

Rec. That is not matter of law. You have had long notice of 
your trial, and might have prepared for it. How long have you 
had notice of your trial? 

KiDD. A matter of a fortnight. 

Dk. Oxenden. Can you tell the names of any persons you 
would make use of in your defence ? 

KiDD. I sent for them, but I could not have them. 

Dr. O. Where were they then ? 

KiDD. I brought them to my Lord Bellamont in New England. 

Rec. What were their names? You cannot tell without book?^ 
Mr. Kidd, the court sees no reason to put off your trial, therefore 
you must plead. . . . 

Kidd. I beg your Lordships I may have counsel admitted, and 
that my trial may be put off. I am not really prepared for it. 

Rec. Nor never will be, if you can help it. 

Kidd. If your Lordships permit those papers to be read, they 
will justify me. I desire my counsel may be heard. . . . 

Mr. Coniers.2 We admit of no counsel for him. . . . 

Mr. Lemmon. He ought to have his papers delivered to him, 
because they are very material for his defence ; he has endeavored 
to have them, but could not get them. 

Mr. Contcers. You are not to appear for any one till he pleads, 
and that the court assigns you for his counsel." 

So the trials were hurried on then and there. The wit- 
nesses for the prosecution, two doubtful characters of the 
crew, one of whom, as accidentally appeared, had previously 
stated that Captain Kidd would be able to justify himself in 
everything he had done, went through their parrot-like stories 
on each of the several indictments. Hearsay evidence, 
opinions, and assertions as to Kidd's motives and intentions 

1 Meaning evidently his lists of the crew. 

2 For the government. It is well to remember that in the case of Captain 
Cuddiford, who was accused of piracy and tried at about this time, the court 
allowed him counsel without hesitation. In Kidd's case, however, it is quite 
probable that the officers of the government saw very clearly that counsel for 
Kidd would be likely to ask many questions that would prove embarrassing for 
the eminent partners of the latter. 



264 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

were all admitted in evidence without question, — till Kidd 
asked one of the witnesses in despair : " Mr. Bradinham, are 
you not promised your life to swear away mine?" The 
cross-examinations of these witnesses by the prisoners on 
trial for their lives, ignorant men, most of whom prob- 
ably had never been in a court-room before, would have 
been ludicrous, had it not been so pitiable. The prisoners 
were not allowed to testify in tlieir own behalf, nor for each 
other, and had really nothing to offer which could be looked 
at in the light of a defence. ^ They were found guilty, almost 
as a matter of course, and then, when asked by the court 
what they had to say, the following remarkable colloquy 
took place, between Kidd and Chief Baron Ward, who pro- 
nounced the sentence : 

"Kidd. I have many papers for my defence, if I could have 
had them. 

L. C. B. Ward. What papers were they? 

Kidd. My French passes. 

L. C. B. Ward. Where are they? 

Kidd. My Lord Bellamont had them. 

L. C. B. Ward. If you had had the French papers, you should 
have condemned the ships. 

Kidd. I could not because of the mutiny in my ship. 

L. C. B. Ward. If you h'ad anything of disability upon you to 
make your defence, you should have objected to it at the heg inning 
of your trial. What you mean by it now I cannot tell." 

So the "trial" ended. Captain Kidd may possibly have 
been a pirate, but it was not proved by these proceedings ; 
they may perhaps be the subject of future revision by a 
higher tribunal, — in the words of Rudyard Kipling : — 

" When the last grim joke is entered 
In the big, black Book of Jobs." 

1 Kidd had three or four naval officers present to testify to his character. All 
spoke well of him, hut this of course had little or no bearing upon the cases on 
trial. As for the killing of the sailor Moore, it may have amounted to a grade 
of manslaughter; but if the mutinous disposition of the men existed, as there is 
every reason to believe it did, the matter would not have been taken notice of 
under simil.ar circumstances on any other vessel in the service. 



EXECUTION OF CAPTAIN KIDD 265 

Three days after the trial, upon the 12th of iMa}-, 1701, 
William Kidd was hanged at Execution Dock, Wapping.^ 
His confiscated effects, supposed to have been mainly such 
portions of the proceeds of the cargo of the " Quedagh " mer- 
chant as the English government could get into its posses- 
sion, and amounting to something over £6400, were added to 
the endowment of Greenwich Hospital, the unfinished towers 
and quadrangle of which were probably some of the last 
objects which Captain Kidd beheld as he looked from the 
scaffold upon the muddy shores of Wapping, over the low 
cottages of Rotherhithe, and down the long Limehouse Reach 
of the Thames, crowded with vessels of all descriptions. 
There, within the walls of that world-renowned charity for 
seamen, the British Admiralty might, with merit, place a 
memorial tablet to William Kidd, as to one of the benefactors 
of the hospital, with the simple inscription, taken from a 
tomb in the great abbey, at the other end of the metropolis : 

" Qualis erat, iste dies indicabit." 

Kidd's imaginary exploits became the fruitful theme of sailors' 
yarns, and a lurid ballad, sung to the then popular Whig air 
of " Ye Jacobites by name give an ear, give an ear 1 " was 
long a favorite among them, its strains, sung in rather lively 
measure, being often heard over the water of a summer night: 

" I murdered William Moore 

As I sailed, as I sailed. 
I murdered William Moore 

As I sailed. 
I murdered William Moore, 
And I left him in his gore. 
Not many leagues from shore, 

As I sailed." 

1 None of the members of Kidd's crew, who were tried and condemned to 
death with him, were ever executed, as far as we are informed. It was probably 
never designed that they should be. Statements have been made by certain 
writers, without giving their authority, that the members of Kidd's crew, who 
were tried with him were also executed, but the records of the trial, though men- 
tioning the carrying out of the sentence in Kidd's case are silent as to the crew. 



266 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

Captain Kidd's widow married, in 1703, for her fourth hus- 
band, Christopher Rousby, a man of considerable political 
influence in the colony. Mrs. Kidd's property in New York 
was confirmed to her by the English government ; and she 
and her husband resided for a time in the old Bowery mansion 
of Director Stuyvesant, whose farm they had leased. Mrs. 
Sarah Rousby attained a great age, much of the latter part of 
her life being spent in New Jersey. Her will, bearing date 
November 1, 1732, was proved some twelve years later, at 
which time she seems to have left four children surviving 
her. 



CHAPTER XIX 

SERGEANT DANIEL LITSCHO AND HIS TAVERN. — ANDRIES 
JOCHEMSEN. — THE " OUTHOEK:' — WALL STREET AND 
THE PALISADES OF 1653. — TYMEN J AN SEN, THE SHIP 
CARPENTER, AND HIS HOUSE 

I bade her on her license look, 
" Oh Sir," quoth she, "ye are mistook, 
I have a lesson without book, 
Most perfect ; 
If I my license should observe, 
And not in any point to swerve, 
Both I and mine, alas ! should starve. 
Not surfeit." 

Ballad of " Robin Conscience." 

NEXT in an easterly direction beyond the grounds of 
Govert Loockermans, stood, upon the Shore Road, 
in the year 1655, a building which appears to have been, as 
early as 1645, in the possession of Dirck Volckertsen, one of 
the oldest settlers ; was subsequently for a time the prop- 
erty and probably the residence of Govert Loockermans, and 
then became the tavern of Sergeant Daniel Litscho. As the 
records of Litscho's transactions relating to his property at 
this place are very imperfect, we have to glean our informa- 
tion largely from detached references and other scraps of in- 
formation, supplying something from conjecture. Daniel 
Litscho or Letscho is supposed to have been a native of the 
town of Cosslin in Pomerania, near the coast of the Baltic 
Sea.i He reached New Amsterdam at an early date, though 

1 The name "Leko," with some slight variations, forms the appellation of 
several villages near this town, and the sergeant's name may have been derived 
from one of them, — not an unusual case. 



268 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

the year is not known. Pomerania suffered severely, about 
the year 1630, in the Thirty Years' War, as has already been 
noticed (ante^ page 225), and it is not unlikely that Litscho 
may have quitted his country at that time. At any rate, 
this house upon the Shore Road was in his occupation before 
1648, in which year he was one of the twelve licensed tavern- 
keepers of New Amsterdam. His tavern seems to have been 
a good-sized building, for it is occasionally spoken of as " the 
great house," though this is perhaps only in comparison with 
a smaller one afterwards built to the east of it. It had at 
least a quarter of an acre of ground attached to it, with a 
frontage upon the river road of some seventy-five feet, and 
back of its garden were a few apple-trees,^ which were called 
its "orchard," and which about the time of our survey had 
been the subject of great depredations by the vagrant goats 
of the town, which were permitted to feed on the vacant " out- 
hoek " of the Jan Damen farm, extending from this point to 
the city " Wall," upon the north line of the present Wall 
Street. The tavern seems to have stood a little distance back 
from the line of the street, and its site is in good part occu- 
pied by the present building No. 125 Pearl Street.^ 

Sergeant Daniel Litscho no longer kept tavern here at the 
time of our survey in 1655. In the spring of 1651, he leased 
the house to one Andries Jochemsen, who kept a tavern or 
ale-house here for many years, and afterwards acquired the 
property. Litscho, in a short time after the last-mentioned 
date, appears to have exchanged his house and land at this 
place with Claes Hendricks, a carpenter, for a somewhat 
larger parcel of land owned by the latter, just outside of the 

^ In a deed, supposed to be of this property, from Dirck Volckertsen to Govert 
Aersen, in 1645, the vendor of the property reserves the right "to remove six 
apple-trees." 

^ The property seems in part to liave belonged originally to the tract granted 
to Tymen Jansen, and subsequently to have been controlled by Govert Loocker 
mans. In 1G44, this portion of the Tymen Jansen patent was apparently re- 
granted by the Director and Council to Jan Damen. Dirck Volckertsen was the 
husband of Damen's step-daughter, and, probably enough, had acquired an en- 
largement of his ground from his father-in-law. 



JOCHEMSEN'S TAVERN 269 

gate of the palisades at Wall Street. There the sergeant 
dwelt, and probably kept a tavern, at the time of our survey, 
and for a short period thereafter, as will be noticed in proper 
order. 

As for Andries Jochemsen, he had the usual troubles of a 
tavern-keeper with the Dutch authorities. He could not 
resist the temptation of occasionally tapping on Sundays dur- 
ing the hours of preaching, when some of the idle negroes or 
other good-for-nothing vagabonds of the town found their 
way into his tavern. Nor was he always particular to turn 
away his customers at nine o'clock in the evening, as the 
ordinances required. The schout often had to pay disciplinary 
visits to Jochemsen's tavern, and these were greatly resented 
by the tavern-keeper's huysvrouw, insomuch that the officer 
reported to the burgomasters upon one occasion that after 
having noted down Andries " for the fine," the wife of the 
latter " called out after him : ' Schout, I have something to say 
to thee ; hast thou any soul or conscience ? Dost thou expect 
to go to heaven?' — and more such like words, so that if he 
were as willing as she, there would have been a street uproar." 
These pointed inquiries, so disconcerting to a New York 
official, even at that early day, were however denied by An- 
dries. His recollection was that the remark made to the 
schout was merel}^ : " Thou hast a conscience, which is not 
worth much," or, " which is somewhat large." 

Claes Hendricksen, the carpenter, seems to have built a 
house upon the easterly side of the plot of ground he had ac- 
quired from Sergeant Litscho, and an earlier building doubt- 
less stood there also, for in subsequent transfers of the 
premises they are said to contain two houses, one of which was 
a small one and appears to have been afterwards removed. 
About the time of our survey these buildings passed through 
several hands in quick succession, possibly under the fore- 
closure of a mortgage upon them. They were held in 1655 
by Arent van Curler, and do not seem to have been regularly 
tenanted. Finally they were sold in 1659 to one Jan Lour- 
ensen, who resided here for many years. At the period of our 



270 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

survey, these were the hxst houses along the shore within the 
town palisades at Wall Street, but within a year or two later, 
Sergeant Litscho, whose house outside the gate had been con- 
demned by the authorities as standing too near the fortifica- 
tions, returned to this spot, and built upon some land he had 
recently purchased upon the Damen " outhoek." His house 
joined immediately to that of Jan Lourensen upon the east, 
and here he, and after liis death in 1662 his wife Anneken, 
kept a tavern for a long period, she being well known in the 
later English times as " Mother Daniels." ^ This tavern was 
a prominent one, and derived not a little importance from the 
fact that it was a sort of fire station for the eastern part of the 
town, — a dozen fire-buckets having been ordered in 1659 to 
be kept here for use in cases of emergency. 

This, however, was after the time of our survey. In 1655, 
all the space from Arent van Curler's houses (or from about 
the present building, No. 129 Pearl Street) to the earthwork 
and palisades, which ran along the northerly line of the 
present Wall Street, — being a distance of about two hundred 
and seventy-five feet, — was waste ground, where goats 
browsed, and where dandelions starred the sod in spring, as 
they do now in many a similar neglected spot in the outskirts 
of the city. 

The land lying along the river road, or the modern Pearl 
Street, and extending from a short distance east of the present 
Hanover Street to Maiden Lane, had been granted by the 

1 Under the Dutch system of names, by which her own appeared as Anneke 
Danielse. This lady, lii^e many of her neighbors, had seen a good deal of the 
world. She was the daughter of one Claas Croesens, and had in her earlier life 
married Jan Janseu Swaartveger, wlio is supposed to liave been in the military 
service of the West India Company. She accompanied her husband to Brazil, 
and there, at the Castle of Rio Grande, her son, Harmanus Janseu, was born, about 
the year 1643. Her first husband iiaving died, we find her about the year 1647 
married to Sergeant Litscho, by whom she had one daughter, Anna. Her son 
Harmanus is said in 1662 to be living in New Amsterdam, engaged in the study 
of medicine and surgery. Her daughter Anna married William Bartre or Pear- 
tree, sometimes spoken of as " Colonel," and Frances, the daughter of the latter, 
who married William Smith, a merchant, was the mother of William Peartree 
Smith, prominent in the Colonial days of New York. 



THE OUTHOEK 271 

Director and Council, at a very early date, to two or three in- 
dividuals, who had built upon and otherwise improved their 
holdings. Among these proprietors was Tymen Jansen, master 
ship carpenter for the West India Company, who in 1643 re- 
ceived a grant for a parcel upon which he must have previ- 
ously resided for a number of years, and which seems to have 
stretched along the river road, about from the present No. 125 
Pearl Street to what is now the rear of the Seaman's Savings 
Bank building at the northwest corner of Pearl and Wall 
streets, — a distance of about four hundred and fifty feet. In 
depth this plot of ground averaged almost two hundred and 
twenty-five feet, so that its area amounted to more than two 
acres. Tymen Jansen died in, or soon after, the year 1644 : 
previously, however, he appears to have sold, or to have 
agreed to sell to Jan Jansen Damen, whose farm adjoined him 
upon the west, the bulk of his holding, being almost two acres 
in area, and lying nearest the town ; it was separated from the 
reserved portion of his plot by a lane lying just north of the 
present Wall Street ; ^ the portion thus sold to Damen was 
situated somewhat southeast of Jan Damen's farm, which it 
touched at one corner, — scarcely more than enough to afford 
passage from one parcel of ground to the other. This was 
granted to Jan Damen, and from its shape and situation be- 
came known as the "outhoek " of his farm. When, in 1653, 
the palisades were constructed along what is now the northern 
line of Wall Street, this " outhoek " became entirely separated 
from the body of the farm ; and in the spring of the next year, 
1 654, the heirs of Jan Damen ^ sold this parcel of ground for 

1 This lane led into the ancient Schaape Weytie, or Sheep Pasture, and by 
varions turnings appears to have communicated with the Slyck Steegh, or Mill 
Lane. There are indications that it formed a very ancient road or perhaps wood 
path, in use before the road was laid out along the river-bank, and which perhaps 
ran still farther along the low slopes of the upland into the old lane forming the 
present Gold Street (with which it was in line), and so into Van Tienhoven's lane 
and out to the Second Common Pasture, or present City Hall Park. That por- 
tion of the lane more especially referred to in the text seems to have been swal- 
lowed up by the ditch constructed in 1653 on the north side of the town palisades. 

2 Strictly speaking, the heirs of Jan Damen's deceased wife, Arientje. She 
had acquired the property from her liusband by survivorship, and upon her death, 
soon after his own, it passed to her children by a former husband. 



272 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

" a thousand pieces of green plank," to Jacob Plodder, of Fort 
Orange, or Albany. Plodder appears to have bought the 
ground for speculative purposes ; and in the summer of 1656, 
after some delay in getting his deed for the premises, he sold 
a part of it, probably at auction, in six parcels, to as many dif- 
ferent individuals. These seem, in their turn, to have bought 
"for a rise," for, with the exception of Daniel Litscho, who 
built upon liis plot at the westerly end of the " outhoek," as 
previously mentioned, the rest of the purchasers appear to 
have allowed their lots to remain unimproved for a number 
of years. 

To the stroller, passing up Pearl Street, it is somewhat 
difficult to realize, as Wall Street with its hurrying, jostling 
throng, opens before him, that here, about two centuries and 
a half ago, little was to be seen except a rather forlorn earth- 
work of sods, four or five feet in height, above which showed 
a perhaps equal height of roughly hewn and pointed "pali- 
sades," formed of the trunks of small trees six inches or 
thereabouts in diameter. At the foot of the earthwork was 
an open space along which the burgher militia companies 
occasionally drilled, and sentries paced now and then at periods 
of alarm, but which at other times lay solitary and waste. 

This line of defence, occupying the northerly side of Wall 
Street, stretched (as originally laid out) straight across the 
island, from the East River to the North River, passing over 
the site of the present Trinity Church. On the further side, 
lay its trench, " four or five feet in depth, and ten or eleven 
broad, somewhat sloping," — using the not very precise lan- 
guage of the order of its construction. Tliis order of the 
Council bears date the 20th of April, 1653. The details 
of the construction of this line of defence, given by Mr. D. T. 
Valentine,^ evidently refer to merely preliminary and ten- 
tative plans under discussion by the Director and Council.^ 

1 In Manual N. Y. Com. Council, 1862, p. 520. 

2 One of these plans provided for a cnrtaiu of planks four inches thick, instead 
of the pali.sades, and these seem to have been afterwards added or substituted, 



THE PALISADES OP 1653 ^n 

The work was intended, of course, only as a defence against 
an attack by land from an enemy without artillery, — either 
from the Indians or from the New England colonists, with 
the latter of whom trouble was anticipated about this time. 

No mention is made in the original proceedings, of the con- 
struction of bastions along the line of defence, but in " The 
Duke's Plan," so called, of the town as it was in the year 
1661, we find that five small "flat" bastions, of a semi-ellip- 
tical form, had by that time been constructed along the 
works. These merely projected far enough from the curtain, 
or main line, to allow a couple of guns to be mounted upon 
each of them ; they were, in all probability, constructed with- 
in a year or two after the original works, and their positions 
are quite closely defined. Proceeding from the east toward 
the North River, the first of these bastions was situated just 
about opposite the head of the present Hanover Street ; the 
r.econd was a few feet west of the present William Street, 
being located about at the spot where now stands the en- 
trance to the Bank of America ; the third occupied the south- 
west part of the Sub-Treasury Building, at the corner of Wall 
and Nassau streets ; the fourth was a few feet east of Broad- 
way, being nearly upon the site of the building No. 4 Wall 
Street ; and the fifth stood at the rear of the present Trinity 
Church. Through these defences, two narrow gates gave ac- 
cess to the town, — the so-called " Land Poort " at the present 
Broadway, and the " Water Poort " at the river road, or pres- 
ent Pearl Street. 

About the period of the surrender to the English, in 1664, 
several changes were made in the " fortifications ; " and the 
bastions, which had been somewhat too close together, were 
demolished, with the exception of the second and the fifth 

and to have been probably furnished upon contract by the heirs of the Damen 
farm from the " thousand pieces of green plank " for which they sold the 
" outhoek " to Jacob Flodder, in 1654, as previously stated in the text. That the 
palisades were originally used, is shown, however, by a report made to the Council 
in 1655 that " about 65 of the new palisades have been chopped down, and used 
for fire-wood," — some of the suburban residents evidently having possessed the 
same traits in the seventeenth century as at the present day. 

18 



274 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

of those above noted, — if, indeed, the fifth was not rather 
rebuilt at this time, at a point nearer Broadway than before. 

In 1673-74, at the time of the recapture of the town by the 
Dutch, Governor Colve effected considerable further changes 
in these works. A general clearance of buildings and ob- 
structions in their vicinity took place, in the course of which 
several interesting landmarks were demolished. That portion 
of the fortification west of Broadway was entirely rebuilt 
upon new lines, being turned to the south, towards the pres- 
ent Rector Street, in such a manner as to cover its exposed 
flank, in the direction of the North River; the site of the 
present Trinity Church was now left entirely outside of the 
works. 

The second bastion, above spoken of, near the present 
William Street, was now considerably enlarged, and a new 
one was constructed just east of Broadway: these received 
names, according to the custom of the Dutch, and were 
known as " HoUandia " and " Zeelandia." The gate at 
Broadway was closed, and a new one was constructed at the 
head of Broad Street, where it was commanded by both the 
bastions; the road thence turned along the trench, and in 
front of the westerly bastion into Broadway. A gate, or at 
least an opening, at Broadway seems to have been restored 
within a few years, in compliance with a public demand, but 
the gate at Broad Street appears to have remained in use till 
the final destruction of the works about the end of the seven- 
teenth century.^ 

An observer, standing at the narrow " Water Poort," look- 
ing northwards, in tlie year 1655, saw before him the ditch 
of the town " fortification ; " upon its south bank the line of 
palisades nine feet high, and upon its north bank the fence 
of the Damen farm, formed a vista extending straight up the 
hill, towards the North River. Over the ditch a rough bridge 
was probably thrown, at the gate, and through it ran a small 
rill collected from springs at the foot of the hillside pasture 

1 111 1674 an order of council was made for tlie construction of "a little 
gate " at Smits Vly, for a foot passage. 



TYMEN JANSEN 275 

known as the Claaver Weytie of the Damen farm. Over this 
streamlet, and upon the east side of the road or present Pearl 
Street, a score and more of years after the time of our survey, 
the butchers of the town ^ erected slaughter-houses, much as 
the poulterers of London, centuries ago, built their scalding- 
house over the somewhat similarly situated stream called the 
Wallbrook. These slaughter-houses, and the pens for cattle 
which were situated opposite them, were long conspicuous 
features in this part of the town : at the period of our survey, 
however, neither the slaughter-houses nor the cattle-pens 
existed. In place of the latter, there stood near the bank of 
the trench of the palisades, and in inconveniently close prox- 
imity to the gate of the town, the house built more than 
twenty years before, by Director-General Van Twiller, for 
Tymen Jansen, the master ship-carpenter at New Amsterdam 
for the West India Company, 

Of Tymen Jansen's antecedents but little appears in the 
early records. He was born about the year 1603, and came to 
New Amsterdam a young man, for he was in the employ of 
the Company before 1633. He was a busy man in his occu- 
pation, and during Director Van Twiller's term of office, from 
1633 to 1638, he is said, in a report soon after the latter date, 
to have " made many repairs, and built new vessels, with a 
wood-cutters' boat, and various farm boats and skiffs," so that 
the shore opposite his house, and near the foot of the present 
Wall Street, must have been the scene of considerable activity 
in these first ship-building operations of New York. To the 
house was attached almost half an acre of ground.^ The 
building must have stood very nearly upon the spot now (1901) 
occupied by a stationer's shop under the Seaman's Savings 
Bank, but projecting somewhat out into the present Pearl 
Street, the road at this place appearing to have originally 
curved to the eastward a little more than do the lines of Pearl 
Street ; the straightening, doubtless, took place at the time of 
building the gate in the palisades, in 1653. Here Tymen 

^ Prominent :ihioii<j^ whom were Thomas Robinson and James Burne. 

2 His origiual plot, as above stated, contained somewhat more than two acres. 



276 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

Jansen lived for some ten or twelve years with his wife, 
Marritie, and his little daughter Elsie, of whose troubled life 
in after years, as the wife of Jacob Leisler, mention has already 
been made.^ Jansen seems to have prospered, and in 1642 
and 1643 he received grants of a considerable tract of land 
upon Long Island, covering the site of the present court-house 
of Queens County and its vicinity, in Long Island City. 
Whether he had grown independent with years, and was 
desirous of attending to his own private affairs, or whether he 
was not in as high favor with Director Kieft as with his pre- 
decessor, does not appear; but we find that in 1644 the Direc- 
tor and Council complained of him for neglecting to repair 
the yachts " Amsterdam " and " Prins Willem," to which 
he responded, somewhat tartly, that " he has done his best, 
and cannot know when a vessel is leaky unless those in charge 
inform him of the fact; furthermore, that nothing can be done 
without means." Jansen, however, like many other pioneers 
of the colonies of America, was not fated to attain old age ; 
he died before the year 1646, and in that year his widow mar- 
ried Dirck Cornelissen, of Wensveen, a carpenter by trade, 
who was probably the son of Cornells Leendertsen, the former 
business associate of Go vert Loockermans.^ 

Dirck Cornelissen dying in the year 1648, in the following 
year his widow married Govert Loockermans, as previously 
mentioned (an^e, page 241), and removed to the house of the 
latter at the present Hanover Square. Some time afterwards 
Loockermans and his wife sold the shipwright's former house 
to one Claes Hendiicksen, and he, in his turn, seems to have 
exchanged the property, about the beginning of 1653, with 
Sergeant Daniel Litscho, for his house and ground situated 

1 See ante, pages 242, 245. 

2 Dirck Cornelissen seems to have been something of a practical joker. In 
1643, Tomas Broen, a corporal of the garrison, complained to the Council that 
while he was on duty, Dirck Cornelissen, carpenter (evidently on the score of 
some alleged claim against the West India Comyjany), " took off his (Broen's) 
hat, saying : ' Thou art the Company's servant; I '11 pledge the hat for drink,' 
taking it away with him, and he hath nailed it on a post in front of his house, 
putting a stone in the hat." 



TYMEN JANSEN'S HOUSE 277 

some distance nearer the fort. (See ante, page 268.) The 
sergeant probably built upon a portion of the ground imme- 
diately east of the old house, and about at the rear of the 
present Seaman's Savings Bank building, and he seems to have 
kept his tavern here for several years. 

In the mean time, an agreement had apparently been made 
by Claes Hendricksen, for the sale of the original house to 
Tryntje Scheerenborg, the widow of Hendrick Jansen, the 
tailor (whose difficulties with Director Kieft have already 
come under our notice,^ and who was drowned in the wreck of 
the " Princess " ) ; she had paid a part of the purchase price, 
but had died without having received any deed of the prop- 
erty. She left two daughters, one of whom was married to 
Isaac Kip, a young man, the son of Hendrick Kip, the tailor ; 
the other daughter was the wife of Gillis Pietersen, from Gouda, 
who was an old employ^ of the West India Company, having 
been " master house-carpenter " for that corporation as early 
as 1638. In the early part of the year 1653, these parties had 
been exceedingly anxious to have their deed of the house pur- 
chased by their deceased mother-in-law ; in fact, they brought 
a suit against Claes Hendricksen to compel him to furnish 
them with a deed, but the court held that they must look to 
Sergeant Litscho for that assurance. 

In the mean time, the " palisades " and the town gate had 
been built, in inconvenient proximity to this house; and 
when, a short time afterwards. Sergeant Litscho offered a deed 
to Kip and Pietersen, and called upon them for the balance of 
the purchase-money remaining due upon the property, they 
refused to pay because of the recent encroachments by the 
authorities. To appease them, the burgomasters visited the 
spot, and after viewing the obstructions, ordered a small guard- 
house, which had been built outside the gate, to be removed. 
The house of Kip and Pietersen remained for three or four 
years blocking up the way ; in 1656 the burgomasters were 
obliged to serve upon them an official notice : " Whereas, the 
fence of your garden by the Town Gate is standing too near 

1 See ante, page 229. 



278 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

the Town Waal, you are therefore ordered to take in your 
fence, so that wagons and horses can conveniently pass." ^ 
Finally, to get rid of the inconvenience arising from the prox- 
imity of this house to the gate, the burgomasters decided to 
condemn and to demolish the building, which was done in June, 
1657, the owners being awarded five hundred and fifty guilders, 
or two hundred and twenty dollars for their property. At 
about the same time, the adjacent tavern of Sergeant Litscho 
seems also to have been removed, though the records do not 
show the amount of his award. 

1 This order of the burgomasters bears date October 7, 1656. The ""Waal" 
referred to is not the line of palisades, but the protection to the shore, by sheet 
piling or otherwise. Mr. Valentine has made the mistake of constantly confound- 
ing the two. 



CHAPTER XX 

THE SMITS VLY. — HENDRICK JANSEN'S GRANT. — AUGUS- 
TYN HEERMANS AND HIS HOUSE. — MARYN ADRIAENSEN 
AND HIS ATTACK ON DIRECTOR KIEFT 

PROCEEDING outwards from the town, we have now 
reached the district long known as the Smits Vly. 
This was a tract of low-lying land between the river shore 
and the foot of the hills forming the body of the island; it 
stretched along the river from near Wall Street about to the 
present Beekman Street, a distance of a quarter of a mile, 
and varied in width from about one hundred and fifty to two 
hundred and fifty feet. Though doubtless full of springs, it 
does not seem to have been sufficiently wet to deter improve- 
ment, for portions of it were built upon at a very early date. 
The term "vly," as used in this connection, does not exactly 
correspond either with the English "valley," or "meadow;" 
the Dutch appellation would be perhaps more accurately 
rendered as "the Smith's Flats." As to the origin of the 
name, nothing is accurately known. Mr. D. T. Valentine, 
and a host of others following him, have stated that the place 
received its name from Cornells Clopper, a blacksmith who 
in 1660 acquired a parcel of ground at the northwest corner 
of Maiden Lane and Pearl Street; but a more careful exam- 
ination would have shown them that the locality is spoken of 
by the same name nearly twenty years before that date, — as 
early as 1641. 

The land along the East River, from Tymen Jansen's 
garden, as far as Maiden Lane, seems to have been originally 
acquired by Hendrick Jansen, the tailor, Director-General 



280 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

Kieft's antagonist.^ He was certainly located there as early 
as 1639, and had apparently about two acres of ground under 
cultivation. His house, according to the results of a careful 
collation of many deeds and other historical material, seems 
to have stood very near Maagde Paetje, or Maiden Lane, 
and to have occupied in part the site of the present building, 
No. 195 Pearl Street. In the Seutter View (so-called) of 
New Amsterdam, or New York, and in two or three others 
which are substantially the same view, though bearing dif- 
ferent names, we have a representation, as of about the year 
1667, of the buildings along the East River shore, from the 
present Wall Street to Maiden Lane. These buildings were 
isolated, and plainly in the sight of the draughtsman, and 
are not open to the same imputations of inaccuracy as are 
several other portions of these views. From the views, the 
Hendrick Jansen house appears to have been a small building 
of the usual Dutch farmhouse type. Like most of such 
buildings, outside of the more thickly settled districts, it 
stood with its broadside to the street, towards which its 
thatched roof sloped. ^ 

In August, 1641, Jansen sold a part of his property here, 
being his " house, barn, barrack, and arable land, " for 2500 
guilders, or about $1000, to a man who afterwards took a 
prominent though brief part in the history of the Colony, — 
Maryn Adriaensen. Upon the premises there seems to have 
been the quite common appurtenance of a small brew-house, 
and this, with its apparatus, Jansen retained, agreeing to 
remove the same, — which he probably did to the western 
portion of his original plot, where he seems to have built a 
new house for himself; but this, too, in November, 1642, he 
sold to one Willem Adriaensen, describing the property then 
as his "garden, dwelling, and brew-house." 

1 See ante, page 229, etc. 

^ Just adjoining tliis house, at the corner of Maiden Lane, there stood, aa 
shown upon the view, another building with its gable end towards Pearl Street. 
This was a house which had been very recently built, upon a narrow lot running 
along the side of Maiden Lane ; the lot had been acquired in 1 666 by Pietcr 
Jansen, a ship carpenter. At the time of our survey, however, this space was 
Rot occupied by any building. 



AUGUSTYN HEERMANS 281 

Upon this latter sale, which was for an equal consideration 
with that of the former parcel, — namely, 2500 Carolus guil- 
ders, — it was stipulated with great care " that 2-4 guilders for 
drink on the bargain shall be contributed by the seller alone 
without charging any part to the purchasers. " This appro- 
priation of 2-4 guilders, or nearly SIO, for "drink on the 
bargain," — being about one per cent on the purchase price 
of the property, — shows that the sale of a piece of New 
Amsterdam real estate was considered, in the middle of the 
seventeenth century, to be an occasion of great dignity and 
importance. 

Of Willem Adriaensen, the purchaser of this property, we 
have but little information ; he is said to have been a cooper 
by trade, and to have had lands upon Long Island. When, 
or in what manner he parted with his property here in the 
Smits Vly we do not know; but within six or seven years 
after Willem Adriaensen's purchase, we find the premises in 
the possession of one of the most interesting characters of 
New Amsterdam, — of Augustyn Heermans, soldier, scholar, 
artist, merchant, land-surveyor, speculator, and manorial 
proprietor. 1 Heermans was a native of Bohemia, and was 
born about the year 1608, in the city of Prague, where his 
father, Ephraim Augustyn Heermans, was one of the members 
of the city council. In the old Bohemian capital, suiTounded 
by vine-clad hills, life passed uneventfully enough, no doubt, 
for the young Augustyn, till he was about ten years of age, 
— then, the memorable year 1618 came on, and during the 
next fifteen years he must have witnessed many of the most 
stirring events of the great epoch known as the Thirty Years' 
War, of which Prague was the very cradle. As a bright, 
adventure-loving boy, he must have gazed with a lively 
curiosity upon the historic window in the old palace of 
Prague, from which, in the year named, the German Em- 

^ Many intereatiiif^ facts respectinj^ Augnstyn Heermans have been brought 
out recently in a paper, written for the Maryland Historical Society by General 
James G. "Wilson, upon Heermans' " Manor of Bohemia," in Maryland. From it 
several of the particulars given in the text are drawn. 



282 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

peror's commissioners and their secretary were thrown into 
the castle-trench by the enraged Protestant deputies of the 
estates of Bohemia, and upon the heap of litter which won- 
derfully enabled them to escape death in their eighty feet 
fall. Soon afterwards he must have seen the streets of the 
capital filled with troops from all parts of Bohemia, now 
urged irrevocably into rebellion against their Austrian, 
Roman Catholic ruler Matthias, the head of the German 
Empire; a little later, perhaps, he may have watched them 
march through the Horse Market and Gate, and into the 
Vienna Road, under their bold leader, Count Thurn, to 
besiege the emperor in his capital itself. 

So, too, he must have seen Prague ablaze with enthusiasm 
and with gayety over the coronation of the king whom the 
Bohemian estates had chosen, Frederic, Count Palatine of 
the Rhine, and of his queen, the beautiful Princess Elizabeth 
of England. Then came a change ; on the afternoon of the 
8th of November, 1620, all Prague was shaken by the 
thunder of the cannon from the White Mountain, three 
miles west of the city, where eighty thousand men were 
engaged in combat. Among the spectators who crowded 
the house-tops and the walls, may well have been the young 
Heermans, who from thence could have seen the Bohemian 
army melt away, in the course of an hour or so, before the 
troops of the emperor, leaving the mountain-sides and plateau* 
black with the bodies of more than four thousand slain. 

Dark days followed in Prague; the short-reigned king, 
Frederic, and his household fled by night; the city was sur- 
rendered to the emperor without opposition; a few months 
of inaction were allowed to supervene, in order to draw back 
to Prague the escaped Protestant leaders ; then the net was 
sprung, and the boy Heermans could hear the death-bell 
tolling daily for executions of the condemned rebels ; while 
the famous Karlsbriicke over the Moldau, so captivating to 
a boy of twelve or thirteen, where the river lay with its lake- 
like waters and green, willowed islands, was now a place 
to be shunned, — for above it was fixed a long row of the 




Augustine IIkrrmaxs. 
From the portrait by himself on his " Map of Maryland," Britisl\ Museum. 



COUNT WALLENSTEIN 283 

mouldering heads of the principal men of Prague and of 
Bohemia. If Augustyn Heermans' family did not itself 
suffer at this time, it must have been fortunate, for it 
belonged undoubtedly to the Protestant faction, which had 
been previously strong in Prague. However this may have 
been, the victorious Romanist party carried matters with a 
hard hand, and times grew worse and worse for the van- 
quished Protestants, till in 1627 they were given the last 
alternative of either abandoning their religion or their 
country. 

During these gloomy times, young Augustyn Heermans, 
now growing up to manhood, must have often seen in the 
streets of Prague a tall, thin man with stubby red hair and 
small sparkling eyes, and with a stern and somewhat ab- 
stracted air, for whom people already made way with a 
respectful awe. This person was Count Albert von Wal- 
lenstein,^ known then as a man of consummate military 
abilities, who was high in favor with the Emperor, and who 
had been enriched with scores of the confiscated estates of 
the Bohemian nobles. His princely ostentation, leadership 
of huge armies, and his vast and obscure designs, which 
alarmed the German court, and which led alike to Wallen- 
stein's tragical end and to his enshrinement in Romance and 
in Poetry, were yet in the future. 

It was about in the year 1625 that Wallenstein disclosed 
his design of forming a great army for the service of the 
harassed emperor, whose rebellious Protestant states were 
now assisted by various foreign countries; this army was 
to be raised and partly maintained at Wallenstein's own 
expense, but principally by exactions upon the Protestant 
territories. The plan was soon afterwards carried into effect ; 
and among those who entered the service of the great leader 
was Augustyn Heermans. Whether necessity led to his thus 
entering a service which in some respects is not likely to 
have been congenial to him we cannot tell. He is said to 

1 More strictly Waldstein ; the other appellation has been appropriated, how- 
ever, by history and by poetry. 



284 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

liave served in Wallenstein's army through several cam- 
paigns, and was present at that general's defeat by the 
Swedes, in November, 1632, at the battle of Lutzen, in 
which the head of the Protestant cause, the great Gustavus 
Adolphus, King of Sweden, lost his life. 

It was perhaps during the temporary breaking up of 
Wallenstein's army after the battle of Lutzen, that Heer- 
mans found an opportunity of leaving the service and of 
coming to America. He is said to have come over as the 
clerk, or agent of the firm of Gabry and Sons, merchants at 
Amsterdam,^ and was certainly for many years their factor 
at New Amsterdam. Though he had grown up in a dis- 
tracted period, he seems to have been a man of considerable 
attainments, and is said, in addition to his own Bohemian, to 
have had some acquaintance with the Latin, German, Eng- 
lish, Dutch, French, and Spanish languages, — one or two 
of these, indeed, he may have picked up in Wallenstein's 
polyglot army. 

Soon after Heermans' arrival in New Netherland, and in 
the course of the year 1633, he seems to have been despatched 
to the Dutch settlements on the South, or Delaware River, 
and while there he was present and a witness, at the purchase 
by one Arent Coersen from the Indians of a tract of land near 
the mouth of the Schuylkill River, which land is supposed to 
have extended very near to, if it did not actually include, the 
site of the present city of Philadelphia. Augustyn Heermans 
now, for a number of years, appears to have remained quietly 
at New Amsterdam, attending to the mercantile concerns of 
his principals. Probably before the year 1651 he had built 
a large brick storehouse upon Pearl Street between the old 
church and the fort. This, in its day, was one of the most 
substantial buildings in the town ; ^ it occupied a site, upon 
which there is reason to believe had previousl}' stood, for a 
number of years, a smaller storehouse of the Gabrys ; and the 

^ See additional particulars respecting Heermans, ante, page 53, etc. 
2 Its value was appraised in 1653 as 8500 guilders, or 3400 dollars of the 
present currency. 



HEERMANS AT NEW AMSTERDAM 285 

larger building appears to have been only held in trust for 
that firm by Heermans. A short time before this period, 
or about in the year 1647, Heermans had acquired a plot of 
something over an acre of ground, lying just north of Burger 
Jorissen's land in Hanover Square; it was an interior parcel, 
to which access was had through the narrow lane called the 
"Slyck Steegh," previously described. ^ It was leased and 
used for garden purposes for many years by Allard Anthony, 
but after the opening of Smith (or the present William) 
Street, which intersected it, it was sold off in lots by Heer- 
mans about the year 1660. 

In the mean time, prior to 1649, Heermans had become 
possessed in some uncertain way, as above stated, of the 
western portion of the land of Hendrick Jansen, the tailor, 
in the Smits Vly, and of the house built by the latter thereon, 
about the years 1641-42, and which he had sold to Willem 
Adriaensen. This property contained about two hundred feet 
frontage along the river, and was something over that dis- 
tance in depth, so that it comprised about an acre of ground ; 
its rear portion was occupied by the orchard which Hendrick 
Jansen had planted, which extended back as far as the slopes 
of Jan Damen's hillside pasture, known as the Claaver 
Weytie, or the Clover Field. ^ 

Not being a man of family at this time, it is possible that 
Heermans did not as yet occupy the place in Smits Vly 
himself, though, like many others in the settlement, he may 
have had a slave establishment. ^ Heermans was, in fact, a 
man of more than forty years of age wlien, in December, 
1650, he married Janneken Verlett, of Utrecht in the Nether- 
lands ; she is supposed to have been the daughter of Nicolaes 

* See ante, page 152. 

2 The Claixver Weytie extended about to the present William Street 
westerly. As for the laud of Heermans here, it was bisected by the present 
Pine (then called Tienhoven or King's Street) many years after our survey, — 
about in the year 1G89. 

8 A well-known negro about the town known as Jan Augustinus, or " Augus- 
tyn's John," may quite possibly have been a freedman of Augustyu Heermans. 



286 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

Verlett, a widower, who afterwards married Madame Anna 
Bayard, Director Stuyvesant's widowed sister. 

After his marriage, Augustyn Heermans' residence was 
undoubtedly at the house in the Smits Vly; in the course 
of the next few years he seems to have built a larger house 
upon the west side of the original one; and the two build- 
ings are shown, standing gable end to the road in the Seutter 
View; they would appear to have stood a short distance 
back from the highway. What Heermans calls his "great 
house " must have occupied a good portion of the site of the 
present warehouse, No. 175 Pearl Street, while the older 
structure stood partly upon the site of the building. No. 177, 
and partly upon that of No. 179. 

Here Augustyn Heermans spent the last ten or twelve 
years of his residence in New Amsterdam. Fronted by the 
shingly beach of the East River, and backed by its orchard 
and the hillside, the place was a quiet haven where its pro- 
prietor often, fio doubt, found opportunities to contrast the 
prevailing calm with the turbulent experiences of his early 
life. All traces of the locality as it was in Heermans' day 
have long passed away, however; and he must live largely in 
imagination who can find in the dark street and melancholy 
warehouses, and clattering trains of the elevated railway 
overhead, anything to remind him that here Augustyn Heer- 
mans, awakened on a summer morning by the carolling of 
the robins in his orchard, could look from his windows upon 
the early mist covering the East River, and call to mind, 
perhaps, a foggy morning, a quarter of a century before, 
when he with twenty thousand of his comrades stood under 
arms, and through the mists which covered the village and 
plain of Lutzen, on the day of the great battle, heard the 
Saxon troops of Gustavus Adolphus singing: — 

" Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott, 
Eiii gute Weill- uud Waffen," 

Augustyn Heermans' political experiences in New Amster- 
dam were not, however, entirely tranquil. In 1649 he had 



HEERMANS AND TIENHOVEN 287 

joined in the opposition to the colonial policy of the West 
India Company; and as one of "the Nine Men," so-called, 
his name headed the signers of the historic document known 
as the " Vertoogh, " or " Remonstrance, " to the States-Gen- 
eral, prepared by Adriaen van der Donck in that year. In this 
paper, Stuyvesant and his secretary. Van Tienhoven, were 
handled without gloves, and its signers had plenty of trouble 
to look for from their malicious adversaries in the colonial 
government; most of them got it, too, and Heermans was 
placed under arrest by the Director-General for refusing to 
produce documents which had circulated amongst him and 
his associates. Between Heermans and Van Tienhoven, too, 
there was but little love lost: "That infernal swaggerer 
Tienhoven," Heermans writes, in September, 1651, to 
Adriaen van der Donck, "has returned here, and put the 
country in a blaze." Van Tienhoven, as there is every 
reason to believe, had also lighted a small private fire of his 
own against Augustyn Heermans, for he had scarcely 
returned from the Netherlands, when the merchants John 
and Charles Gabry at Amsterdam presented a petition to 
the States-General, praying that Augustyn Heermans, their 
factor at New Amsterdam, might be ordered to render to 
them an account of his transactions there. Van Tienhoven's 
insinuations, however, if such there had been, do not seem 
to have produced any very permanent effect, for we find that 
the connection between the Gabrys and their factor continued 
apparently for many years longer. 

About this same time, too, in the year 1652, Heermans 
appears to have been made the victim of a despicable trick 
in which the Secretary's hand is more apparent. Heermans, 
and a companion, being upon the point of making a journey 
to New England, in the spring of that year, were, it seems, 
approached by George Baxter, ensign of the garrison, who 
gave them a letter to be delivered to Governor William 
Coddington, of Rhode Island. This letter, apparently by 
some prearrangement, was taken from the travellers in 
Rhode Island, and was opened before the General Court, or 



288 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

Assembly, when it was found to contain an offer purporting 
to come from Director-General Stuyvesant, to send Governor 
Coddington some soldiers to be employed against the inhab- 
itants of Rhode Island. The irritated Rhode Islanders 
immediately placed Heermans and his companion under 
arrest for a treasonable conspiracy against their government. 
They were held to bail in the sum of 100 pounds sterling till 
they should prove their innocence ; and it was only with the 
greatest difficulty that they succeeded in procuring a certifi- 
cate from the Council at New Amsterdam of their ignorance 
of the contents of the letter. 

The difficulties between Heermans and the colonial ad- 
ministration seem to have been smoothed over, for a time 
at least, and in 1659 we find Director-General Stuyvesant 
sending Heermans and one Resolved Waldron, as a deputa- 
tion to visit the Governor of Maryland, in order to establish, 
if possible, an agreement respecting the boundaries of that 
colony, and those of the Dutch settlements along the Dela- 
ware; the appointment may, indeed, have been somewhat 
ungraciously given by the Director-General, and may have 
been largely owing to the fact that Heermans' linguistic and 
general business talents, together with an acquaintance with 
the science of land-surveying which he possessed, rendered 
him perhaps the most fit person in the Colony for this 
business.^ 

1 As Heermans must have been quite young when he entered the military 
service of Wallenstein, and as there seems to be no reason for supposing that he 
was engaged in the pursuit of land-surveying at any time in New Netherland, 
there is perhaps reason to conjecture that he may have been attached to the 
engineer corps of Wallensteiu's army. That lie possessed some artistic talents, 
and that he was the draughtsman of the valuable view of New Amsterdam, of 
about the year 1651 or 1652, which has been already spoken of as the " Visscher 
View," and which in a less finished form is to be found in the second edition of 
his friend Adriaen van der Donck's " Beschrijving van Nieuw Nederland," is 
reasonably well known. It is a curions fact in this connection that Wenceslas 
Hollar, the great artist and topographical illustrator of London, whose sketches 
are now of such value, and who was a contemporary of Augustyn Heermans, 
was likewise a native of Prague in Bohemia, and, like Heermans, he seems to 
have always retained much pride in the place of his nativity. In his views of 
" London before and after the Great Fire" of 1666, in the writer's possession. 



HEERMANS' SURVEY OF MARYLAND 289 

Heermans' journal of this expedition is still extant,^ and 
describes with considerable minuteness the progress of the 
commissioners with their party of soldiers and guides. They 
travelled on foot and by canoe through the forests for several 
days, and at Patuxent, in the Maryland district, they had an 
interview of several days with Governor Fendall, of the 
Colony, and with Philip Calvert, son of Lord Baltimore, the 
proprietor, who was then Secretary of the province, and who 
afterwards succeeded his father in the title and in the pro- 
prietorship of the Colony. From this point Heermans sailed 
down the Chesapeake Bay, and had an interview with the 
Governor of Virginia, and upon his return from the latter 
province he again stopped for a season in Maryland. In his 
journey through the forests between the Delaware and the 
Susquehanna rivers, he had received a favorable impression 
of the country; and now learning that the proprietor of 
Maryland was laboring under many disadvantages from the 
want of an accurate map of his territories, Heermans placed 
himself in communication with Lord Baltimore, offering to 
make a survey and map of the entire province, in considera- 
tion of a manorial grant to himself. This proposition was 
accepted by Lord Baltimore, and Heermans soon entered 
upon the work of his survey, which occupied him for about 
ten years. 2 For this work he received a grant of about thirty 
thousand acres in the present Cecil County, Maryland, and 
in its vicinity. To this tract, part of which he named the 
"Manor of Nova Bohemia," he appears to have removed his 
household from New Amsterdam about the year 1662, in 
which year, on the 19th of June, he received his first patent 
from Lord Baltimore. ^ Here, upon a stream which he called 

these sketches, wonderful in their mastery of topographical details, and executed 
at a period when for twenty years of his life the artist had been engaged upon 
English subjects, appear as of " W. Hollar, of Prague, Bohemia." 

1 See same in Vol. II., N. Y. Colonial Documents. 

2 His large map of Maryland was published by Faitliorne at London, about 
1670; a copy is preserved in the British Museum. It is spoken of in the highest 
terms by contemporaries. 

* General Wilson, in his historical sketch, says that Heermans removed from 

f '' 



290 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

the Bohemia River, near the head of Chesapeake Bay, Heer- 
mans erected his manor house, and here for many years he 
continued to reside upon his estate with considerable dignity. 
" He was the most important personage in that part of the 
Colony," says General Wilson, in the paper to which refer- 
ence has been made, "driving in his coach and four, with 
liveried servants; and with a large deer park, the walls of 
which are still (1889) standing. His estate abounded in 
game, and both he and his sons were fond of shooting and of 
fox-hunting." He and all his family were naturalized as 
English subjects about 16G6, and from time to time during 
the remainder of his life he was engaged in considerable 
public business, and is said to have held correspondence with 
many of the most conspicuous men of that period of colonial 
history. 

Heermans died in 1686: "his monumental stone," says 
General Wilson, " is still to be seen on his manor. ... It 
contains the following inscription : — 

AUGUSTINE HERMAN, BOHEMIAN, 

THE FIRST FOUNDER & 

SEATER OF BOHEMIA MANOR 

ANNO 1661." 

The name became extinct in 1739, but it is understood that 
the female line still continues. The old Bohemia Manor 
House was burned in 1815, and with it are said to have been 
destroyed many valuable paintings, documents, and historical 
mementos. 

Prior to his removal to Maryland, Augustyn Heermans 
had acquired interests in several tracts of considerable size 
on Manhattan Island, but these he gradually disposed of to 
different purchasers. His former residence in the Smits Vly 

New Amsterdam in 1661. It will be found, however, that his youngest daughter, 
Francina, was baptized in the Dutch Church at New Amsterdam, on the 12th 
of March, 1662. The dates of baptism of his other children were as follows: 
Piphraim Georgius, September 1, 1652; Casparus, January 2, 1656; Anna 
Margareta, March 10, 1G58 ; and Judith, May 9, 1660. 



MARYN ADRIAENSEN 291 

remained in the occupation of various tenants till 1672, 
^yhen he sold the eastern portion of his land, with the 
buildings, to Captain John Paine, of Boston, but the latter 
had hardly taken possession when New York was captured 
by the Dutch, and Paine's property was confiscated. The 
buildings, with a number of others, were now condemned and 
demolished, on account of their standing too near the line of 
fortifications ; and though Heermans recovered his land by 
reason of a mortgage which he held upon it, it was bereft of 
most of its value, and he closed out finally his interests here 
by selling the western portion of the plot in 1676 to George 
Heathcote, and the eastern part in 1678 to Jan Jansen Slot. 

We next reach, in proceeding along the Smits Vly, the 
old Dutch house situated in a large garden near the south- 
west corner of the present Maiden Lane and Pearl Street, 
occupied at the time of our survey by Lysbet Tj-ssens. This 
building, of which mention has been previously made (ante^ 
page 280), was originally the house of Hendrick Jansen, the 
tailor, and was purchased from him in August, 1641, by 
Maryn Adriaensen, the husband of Lysbet Tyssens. 

As Augustyn Heermans came from a locality identified 
with the origin of the Thirty Years' War, so Maryn Adriaen- 
sen came from a place in like manner identified with another 
great episode of history, — the struggle for independence of 
the United Netherlands. He was born (as is supposed) at 
Veere, — "the Ferry," — upon the north coast of the island 
of Walcheren, in the province of Zeeland; and two genera- 
tions before, his grandfather may well have been one of the 
"Gueux," or "Sea-beggars," who, from Veere and from 
the neighboring town of Vlissingen, or Flushing, roamed the 
seas, preying upon the commerce of their Spanish masters 
and oppressors, till in 1572 — having had the ports of Eng- 
land closed against them — tliey took by storm from the 
Spaniards the neighboring seaport of Briel, which the}' made 
the seat of their naval power, and thus laid the foundation- 
stone of the Confederacy of the Provinces of the Nether- 



292 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

lauds. Rough aud coarse, but brave, and passionately 
devoted to the house of Orange, they made for themselves 
and for their "land of sluices " a name in History aud Ro- 
mance; and their stern aud somewhat truculent bearing, 
their contempt of show and ostentation, their long swords, 
cropped hair, and scarred faces live in Freiligrath's verse: 

" Dann riiliren die da schliefen liingst, 
Im Grabe sich die Geuseu. 

" Sie steigen auf, sine wilde Schaar, 
Im Kleid von diistrer Farbe, 
Mit langem Schwert, imd kurzem Haar 
Uud auf der Stirn die Narbe." 

Maryn Adriaensen was one of the earliest colonists of New 
Netherland, having come to Fort Orange, or Albanj^, in 1631. 
Here he had a house which in 1G42, shortly after his removal 
to New Amsterdam, he sold to Dominie Johannes Megapo- 
lensis, then recently installed as pastor at Fort Orange. 
Upon taking up his residence in the Smits Vly at New 
Amsterdam in the summer of 1641, Adriaensen seems to have 
become rather closely associated with his well-to-do neighbor 
Jan Jansen Damen, whose farm adjoined the rear of his own 
plot upon the west. He was perhaps in some sort a depend- 
ant of Damen, the latter having loaned him 1000 guilders 
upon the purchase of his house in the Smits Vly. He 
formed one of the party at Jan Damen's farmhouse near 
Broadway, at the famous "Shrovetide dinner," in 1643, at 
which, according to popular belief, the massacre of the 
Indians was planned by Director-General Kieft, with Damen 
and the two sons-in-law of the latter, Cornells van Tien- 
hoven, the secretary, and Abraham Verplanck.^ It is at any 
rate certain that Adriaensen with Jan Damen and Verplanck 
were either signers of the remarkable document prepared 
about this time, and entered on the Council Minutes, calling, 
in the name of the whole community, for the murder of the 
Indians, or else their names were affixed to it by Van Tien- 

^ See ante, page 102. 



KIEFT'S MANIFESTO 293 

hoven himself.^ Whether Maryn Adriaensen had full knowl- 
edge of this business, or whether he was in a condition at the 
time not to know much of anything, he has the unenviable 
distinction of heading the petition, and of receiving the 
license to commit murder granted thereon by Director-Gen- 
eral Kieft.2 When, in the course of a few days after the 
slaughter of the Indians, the smoke of burning farmhouses 
and the reports of massacres of the colonists by the natives 
had shown Kieft that his great scheme had miscarried, he 
promptly set about carrying out a further part of his plan ; 
namely, that of shifting the blame from his own shoulders to 
those of his previously selected scapegoats. He accord- 
ingl}^ issued a sort of manifesto of which the following is a 
portion : — 

"Some persons, delegated by the people, petitioned us to be 
allowed to take revenge while those savages were within our reach, 
apparently delivered in our hands by Divine Providence. We 
entertained an aversion to bring the country into a condition of 
uproar, and pointed out to those persons the consequences to re- 
sult from their design, particularly with regard to those whose 
dwellings were situated in exposed places, as our forces were too 
few to attempt to defend every house with a sufficient number of 
soldiers, and we also presented to them other considerations. 
They, however, persisted in their desire, and told us that if we 
refused our consent, the blood would come upon our own heads, 
and we finally found ourselves obliged to accede to their wishes 
and give them the assistance of our soldiers. And these latter 
killed a considerable number, as did also the militia on their side," 
etc. 

Maryn Adriaensen was no lamb to be led quietly to the 
slaughter in this manner; on the contrary, he was a man of 
a bold and violent disposition, like his ancestors, the Flemish 
sea-rovers. He had, in fact, hardly taken up his residence 
in New Amsterdam when he fell into trouble, from a practice 

^ See the petition, ante, page 103. 

2 This latter document, with its carious mixture of violence, craft, and blas- 
phemy, is set forth upon page 23, ante. 



294 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

he had, in violation of the ordinances, of sailing out in his 
cat-boat to meet incoming vessels before they were boarded 
by the official sloop of the West India Company ; and it was 
perhaps in connection with this same business that he was 
charged by the fiscal with having drawn a knife upon some 
person with whom he had a quarrel. 

When Adriaensen heard that the Director-General was 
attempting to unload the responsibility for the Indian mas- 
sacre mainly upon his shoulders, his rage knew no bounds, 
and he immediately started out to have satisfaction from 
Kieft. On the 21st of March, 1643, Robert Penoyer, a 
young man who was doubtless one of the English soldiers 
in the garrison and off duty, being "in the tavern," — prob- 
ably either "the Great Tavern" upon the shore, or Philip 
Geraerdy's tavern on the Marckveldt, — saw Lysbet Tyssens, 
Maryn Adriaensen 's wife, enter the tavern in a state of great 
perturbation, crying that "her husband would kill the com- 
mander. Go and catch him ! " Penoyer thereupon made his 
way into the fort, and into the Director's house, where he 
found Adriaensen with a pistol cocked, advancing upon the 
Director-General, and crying, " What devilish lies are these 
you are telling of me?" Some person present, however, 
seized Maryn's pistol, while Penoyer took his sword from 
him, and he was immediately placed under arrest. Within a 
short time, however, a serving-man of Adriaensen, one Jacob 
Slangh, appeared at the fort to avenge his master, and fired 
a pistol at the Director-General, but without effect. Slangh 
was thereupon fired on and killed by a sentry in the fort, 
and his head was afterwards affixed to a gibbet. 

As for Adriaensen, his cause was warmly espoused by many 
of the principal men of the Colony, among others by Dominie 
Bogardus,^ and in the excited state of public opinion, it was 

1 " Then you embraced the cause of that criminal, composed his writings, and 
took upon yourself to defend him. But nevertheless he was sent in chains to 
Holland, on which account you audaciously fulminated on the subject during a 
fortniglit, and dishonored the pulpit by your passionate behaviour." 

(Kieft to Dominie Bogardus, 2 January, 1646.) 



LYSBET TYSSENS 296 

deemed prudent by the Council to send him to the Nether- 
lands for trial. We are not informed of the proceedings, if 
any, which took place in the Netherlands in relation to the 
case of Maryn Adriaensen. Mr. D. T. Valentine has found 
evidence that he returned subsequently to New Amsterdam. 
If this were so, he took no prominent part in any matters, 
and he must have died before 1654, for in that year his 
widow Lysbet Tyssens married Gerloff Michielsen of Col- 
lumer Zyll, in Friesland; but he having been killed by the 
Indians within a short time, she went to reside with a 
married daughter at Fort Orange, or Albany. Lysbet, who 
was from Alcmaer in North Holland, seems to have been a 
woman of considerable business ability. After her husband's 
imprisonment she took charge of his property in the Smits 
Vly, and before the spring of 1644 she had sold a consider- 
able portion of it to Jan Jansen Damen, partly, no doubt, in 
extinguishment of the mortgage he held upon the premises. 
The parcel sold to Damen was thrown by him into his well- 
known "Claaver Weytie," or "Clover Pasture." Lysbet 
retained the house, with about half an acre of land, at the 
corner of Maagde Paetje, or Maiden Lane, afterwards in- 
creasing her land by purchase. After the deportation of 
her husband, and later, after his death, she appears to have 
resided upon the premises at times, but at other periods it 
was in the occupation of various tenants. Lysbet Tyssens 
was still living and in possession of the property as late as 
1682, about which time she sold off several lots from her 
garden at this place. She had a son, Tys Marynsen, who 
was a small boy at the time of his father's attack upon Kieft, 
but we have no further information respecting him, and do 
not know whether he reached maturity. 



CHAPTER XXI 

THE MAAGDE PAETJE, OR MAIDEN LANE. —SKIPPER 
CORNELIS SEN. — FRED ERIK LUBBERTSEN AND HIS 
HOUSE. — JAN AND MARY PEECK. — SANDER LEENDERT- 
SEN'S HOUSE.— JAN VINJE, THE FIRST WHITE CHILD 
BORN IN NEW NE THE RLAND.— VINJE' S BREWERY 

THERE is, perhaps, as much about the modern Maiden 
Lane to remind one of the early times of New Amster- 
dam as will be found in any locality of New York at the 
present day. Standing at the corner of Pearl Street and 
Maiden Lane, and looking in the direction of Broadway past 
the dark opening in the tall houses which marks the entrance 
of Liberty Street, — the historic Crown Street of the eighteenth 
century, the name of which was changed at the close of the 
Revolutionary War by the somewhat hysterical New Yorkers 
of the period, because they thought they saw a sort of profana- 
tion in the word " Crown," — the observer notices before him, 
curving away to the right between high and dingy stores and 
warehouses, the same Maagde Paetje, or Maidens' Path, only 
somewbat wider than of yore, which Lysbet Tyssens and 
Frederik Lubbertsen, from their respective dwellings at the 
opposite corners of these same two streets, saw, in the middle 
of the seventeenth century, winding through its hollow, 
between the trees and bushes which lined the fence rows of 
Jan Damen's and of Cornells van Tienhoven's farms on 
either side of it. 

As he passes through Gold, or William, or Nassau streets 
too, the same observer will see before him the very ravine or 
depression, though not so deep as of old, through which 
the first wood-cutters of New Amsterdam traced their 




LooKixG UP Maidkn Lank h,om Pkaul Strkei 



THE MAAGDE PAETJE 297 

path down to the East River shore. In the middle of the 
seventeenth century it was doubtless like hundreds of similar 
low-lying farm lanes of the present day, where the outcasts 
of the forests — dogwoods and elder bushes, sumachs and 
witch-hazels — collect along the hedges, and are overhung 
by cat-briers and bitter-sweet vines, woodbine and the wild 
grape. Towards the shore, near the present Gold Street, was 
a wet spot at the foot of Van Tienhoven's hill pasture called 
" Gouwenberg " (where, near the close of the seventeenth cen- 
tury, tan-yards were established), and here, in the springy 
ground, the arads, first harbingers of the vernal season, made 
their appearance, pushing through the wet soil with their gor- 
geous purple, red, and black hoods, and their coarse leaves of 
pale green. Here the water collected into a small rill, and ran 
down along the lane into the East River through a channel 
likely enough covered, as such rills are apt to be, in the late 
summer by the green and j^ellow masses of the jewel- weed, 
and thickly bordered by mint and tansy. 

What gave this by-lane the name of the Maagde Paetje, 
or Maidens' Path, by which it was known in the town from 
the earhest days, we can only conjecture. Was it in honor 
of Maria, Christina, and Rachel, the three stepdaughters of 
Jan Damen, who must have resided on the adjoining farm 
with their own father, Guillaume Vigne (or Willem Vinje, as 
his Dutch neighbors put it), at the time of the very first ad- 
vance of settlers from the traders' cabins at the Blockhouse into 
Manhattan Island ? We do not know ; but certain it is that 
the lane was and is Maiden Lane,^ — a historic name worth a 
hundred times the meaningless "Pine," "Cedar," and "Lib- 
erty" streets in its vicinity. 

Provision seems to have been first made for the care of 
this lane"(which appears at the time to have been mainly used 

1 Towards the close of the seventeenth century, about the time that streets 
were being laid out through the adjoining Daraen farm, the old lane was occa- 
sionally spoken of as " The Green Lane." Tliis name never became popular, 
however, and was eventually fixed upon the small street west of the present 
Nassau Street, and extending from Liberty Street to Maiden Lane ; this is 
sometimes called Liberty Place at the present day. 



298 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

by Secretary Van Tienhoven for access to parts of his farm 
upon the nortli side of it) in the ground-brief of September 7, 
1641, to Lourens Cornelissen, for the parcel of ground at the 
northwest corner of Pearl Street and Maiden Lane ; " with 
the express condition that the said Lourens Cornelissen shall 
repair the road leading from the farm of Cornelis van Tien- 
hoven to the beach, fit for the use of wagons, and when once 
repaired, at the cost of the aforesaid Lourens Cornelissen, i^ 
shall henceforth and forever be maintained and kept up by 
said L. Cornelissen and Cornelis van Tienhoven, half and 
half." At the time of our survey, the Maagde Paetje had lost 
part of its rural character. This was owing principally to 
the erection of a brewery upon it several years before by Jan 
Damen. This building appears to have stood on the south 
side of the lane, and at the foot of the hill pasture called the 
Claaver Weytie, where the water supply was abundant. The 
position of this building would seem to have been about sixty 
feet east of the present William Street. It had been managed 
for several years by Jan Vinje, the stepson of Jan Damen, but 
in 1658, some seven years after the death of the latter, the 
heirs of the estate sold the brewery with nearly half an acre 
of ground for 1375 guilders ($550) to one Anthony Moore, 
and it then, in the course of several years, passed through 
various hands, eventually coming again into the possession of 
Jan Vinje. This latter personage was for a long time en- 
gaged in the brewing business upon the modern Pearl Street 
near Piatt, and although the period was several years after 
the date of our survey, some reference will be made to him 
in speaking of the latter locality. 

At the northwestern angle of Maiden Lane and Pearl 
Street stood a house, erected probably in 1641 or 1642 by 
Captain Lourens Cornelissen Vanderwel, who, in documents 
executed by himself, bears the imposing designation of 
" Skipper under God of the ship the ' Angel Gabriel,' of about 
one hundred lasts burden." The skipper owned about an 
acre of ground here, stretching back some two hundred and 
fifty feet to the foot of the " Gouwenberg " of Secretary Van 




View of Gold Stkeet. 
Looking towards Maiden Lane. The ancient " Golden HilL' 



SKIPPER CORNELISSEN 299 

Tienhoven's farm. The ground at this, the widest part of 
the Smits Vly, seems to have been pretty wet, and the skipper 
had to establish a broad trench through his garden, about on 
the Hne between the present buildings Nos. 205 and 207 
Pearl Street, and probably another one upon the east side of 
his plot, between the buildings Nos. 219 and 221. 

Of Captain Cornelissen we have not much information. 
In his blustering letter of January 2, 1646, to Dominie Bo- 
gardus, already alluded to,^ Director-General Kief t says : 
" when, however, in 1644, one Lourens Cornelissen was here, 
a man of profligate character, who had violated his oath, had 
committed perjury and theft, he was taken under your pat- 
ronage, and you were in daily correspondence with him, for 
the reason merely that he had slandered the Director." The 
gist of Cornelissen's offence, however, being evidently the 
fact that he had spoken against Kieft, it is perhaps fair to 
look upon the rest of the accusation, coupled as it is with the 
somewhat inconsistent charge of much intimacy with a min- 
ister of the gospel, as rather in the nature of a testimonial 
of good character than otherwise, especially in view of the 
source from whence it came. 

However, Skipper Lourens did not long retain his house in 
ihe Smits Vly, for in the spring of 1643, he sold it, with 
about half an acre of the ground, for the sum of 1600 guil- 
ders, or about $640 of the present currency, to Frederik 
Lubbertsen, who was the owner and probably the occupant 
at the time of our survey. Lubbertsen, who was a man of 
about forty years of age at the time of his purchase of this 
property, had come from Amsterdam, with his wife Styntje 
and a daughter Rebecca. In 1640, he had received a grant 
from the Dutch authorities of a large tract of land at Gou- 
wanus on Long Island ; and it seems probable that from his 
residence on Manhattan Island, he devoted his time to its 
clearing and cultivation, as one of the appurtenances of his 
house in the Smits Vly was an oven, which he stipulated 
should be built capable of baking at one time the equivalent 

1 See ante, page 294, note. 



300 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

in flour of about a bushel and a half of grain, a fact indicative 
of the presence of a considerable force of work-hands, perhaps 
slaves, who doubtless manned his farm-boat daily for many 
years. His Long Island possessions were in plain view from 
his house at the foot of the Maagde Paetje. Looking to his 
left across the East River, he could see, in the direction of the 
Wallabout, his timber land, a tract of about thirty acres of 
magnificent forest trees, some of which were still landmarks 
far into the next century ; ^ it covered the high ground near 
the foot of the present Bridge and Jay streets in Brooklj^n. 

About a mile to the right, down the East River, beyond the 
high sand bluffs forming what are now known as the Brook- 
lyn Heights, lay the large tract acquired by Lubbertsen in 
1640. This extended from about the foot of the present 
Atlantic Avenue, in Brooklyn, nearly a mile along the shore, 
and it ran back from the shore an almost equal distance. A 
large part of it was a region of salt meadows, interspersed 
with ponds and tidal creeks and with small wooded islands 
and sand banks, — the last deposits of the retreating glaciers.^ 
Beyond this low tract, however, the ground rose into swelling 
hills, long cleared and occupied by the Indians as "maize 
land," of which Lubbertsen's grant contained a considerable 
share. 

Prior to the year 1657, Frederik Lubbertsen had become 
a widower; his daughter Rebecca, too, had left him some 
eight or nine years before that time, marrying Jacob Leen- 
dertsen van der Grift and taking up her residence in a house 
upon the east side of Broad^vay, conveyed to her by her 
father. About the date named, we find Lubbertsen marrying 
for his second wife Tryntje Hendrickse, widow of Cornelis 
Pietersen, one of the earlier settlers. It was about this time 
that Lubbertsen, doubtless with the view of establishing him- 
self upon his Long Island farm,^ sold his house in the Smits 

1 A great tulip or whitewood tree, which stood upon the bluff near the shore, 
was known far and wide and is shown on several maps of the eighteenth century. 

2 The tract is now in part occupied by the Atlantic Basin, so called. 

8 Soon after the sale of the Smits Vly property, Lubbertsen seems to have 



BANISHMENT OF MARY PEECK 301 

Vly to Jan Peeck, an eccentric character, part Indian trader, 
part broker between the English and Dutch merchants, and part 
general speculator. ^ His wife, Maria or Mary, managed his 
property, and sometimes disposed of it in his long absences. 
She seems also to have occasionally accompanied him on his 
trading expeditions, where apparently she acquired consider- 
able acquaintance with the Indians, which she turned to ad- 
vantage by selling them liquor, to the great indignation of the 
authorities at New Amsterdam, who, in 1664, fined her 500 
guilders, and banished her from Manhattan Island for this 
offence, " for v^^hich," as they say, " she has long been famous." 
She is said, at this time, to have retired to the new settlement 
of Schenectady for a short period; but the Dutch regime 
coming to an end not long after her banishment, she soon 
returned to New York, and was the owner of a house on 
Hoogh Straet (or Duke's Street, as the Englisli began to 
call it), near the Town Hall, having in the mean time sold 
the establishment in tlie Smits Vly.^ 

The easternmost half of his land in the Smits Vly had 
been sold by Frederik Lubbertsen, in 1652, to one Albert 
Cornelissen ;' it does not appear to have been built upon at 
the time of our survey, and in 1656 most of it came into the 

built a farmhouse near tlie East River shore upon his Long Island farm. This 
stood not far from t'le foot of the present Pacific Street in Brooklyn. Here Lub- 
bertsen resided for many years, and here he died, an aged man, in the latter part 
of the seventeenth century. His large plantation here was divided between his 
two daughters, l)y his second wife : Aeltje, who married Cornelis Sebriug, and 
Elsje, wife of Jacob Hansen Bergen ; their descendants are still to be found in 
Brooklyn. 

1 It was this Jan Peeck who, by reason of his making use, as a trading post 
for traffic with the Indians, of the sheltered haven afforded by the creek empty- 
ing into the Hudson River just south of the mountains of the Highlands (even 
wintering there with his sloop), gave the stream the name of Jan Peeck's Kill, 
which name is preserved in that of the adjacent village of Peekskill in West- 
chester County. 

'^ She is thought to have been tlie person occasionally spoken of in the records 
about this time as " Long Mary," though this is not accurately known. She was 
either the daugliter or sister of Philip du Trieux (or De Truy, as the Dutch 
called him). After some vicissitudes in her life, she is supposed to have married 
Cornelis Volckersen, one of the oldest settlers, and after his death, in 1050, she 
married Jau Peeck. 



302 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

possession of Jan Peeck, still apparently unbuilt upon. After 
Peeck had sold to Cornelis Clopper, in the year 1660, the 
Lubbertsen house, at the corner of Maiden Lane, which has 
just been referred to, he seems to have built a house upon the 
plot which he had acquired from Albert Cornelissen, and this 
remained in possession of him and of his wife for many years. 
This house, which must have occupied the site, or a part of 
the site of the present building No. 207 Pearl Street, was just 
about sufficiently removed from the observation of the town 
authorities to afford a convenient drinking house for Indian 
visitors to New Amsterdam, and it is supposed to have been 
the seat of the illicit liquor traffic for which Mary Peeck was 
banished from Manhattan Island in 1664. 

Next adjoining upon the north to the apparently vacant 
plot of Albert Cornelissen in the Smits Vly, stood in 1655 
a house with about half an acre of ground, belonging to 
an individual who was a rara avis in New Amsterdam, a 
thoroughly Teutonized Scotchman, as much of a curiosity 
in his way as was the Teutonized Englishman, Carel van 
Briigge, already spoken of. This person's appellation among 
his neighbors was the good honest Dutch name of Sander 
Leendertsen. A little investigation, however, shows him 
to have been Alexander (or Sandy) Lindesay, of the Glen, 
in Scotland,^ who is said to have come from the neighbor- 

1 His appellation is evidently derived from the ancient and well-known division 
of the Lindesay family of Scotland into the branch of Glenesk (called frequently 
"of the Glen ") and into that of " the Mount." The latter, which is the elder 
branch, has had considerable lustre thrown upon it by one of its members, Sir 
David Lin<lesay, the Scottish poet of the sixteenth century, who bore the office 
of heraldic Kingat-arms under James IV. Many will remember the poet's de- 
scription, as given by Sir Walter Scott, in " Marmion " : 

" He was a man of middle age ; 
In aspect manly, grave, and sage. 

As on King's errand come ; 
But in the glances of his eye, 
A penetrating, keen, and sly 

Expression found its home ; 
The flash of tliat satiric rage, 



SANDER LEENDERTSEN 303 

hood of Inverness. In Dutch times he used the name 
Sander Leendertsen freely, but after the English regime 
commenced, he called himself usually Alexander Glenn, by 
which family name his descendants were known. 

Alexander Lindesay, or Leendertsen, is said to have come 
to New Netherland at a very early period, employed in some 
capacity by the West India Company at its Fort Nassau on 
the Delaware River, where in 1633 he, with Augustyn Heer- 
mans, were witnesses of the sale of lands on the Schuylkill 
River by the Indians to Arent Coersen. Sander soon became 
an Indian trader, apparently dividing his time between New 
Amsterdam and Fort Orange or Albany, at which latter 
settlement he is found as early as 1646. His place in the 
Smits Vly, which had formerly been the easterly half of the 
garden and ground of Skipper Lourens Cornelissen, was 
granted to Sander Leendertsen by the Director and Council 
in 1646, it having been forfeited by Cornelissen by reason of 
his allowing it to remain vacant and unimproved for more 
than the prescribed period.^ Here Sander immediately built 
a stone house, upon the site of the present glue warehouse. 
No. 211 Pearl Street, and here he resided when in New 
Amsterdam, certainly as late as 1658, and possibly later ;2 
but in 1665 he was one of the pioneers of the new settlement 

" Which, bursting on the early stage, 
Branded the vices of the age, 

And broke the keys of Rome. 
Still is thy name in high account, 

And still thy verse has charms. 
Sir David Lindesay of the Mount, 

Lord Lion King-at-arms ! " 

^ Some years, afterwards, however, Sander acquired a release from Skipper 
Cornelissen. 

'■^ At a period twenty years later than that of our survey, this plot of Sander 
Leendertsen contained another building which must have occupied in part the 
ground covered by the present No. 217 Pearl Street. What this was, or when 
it was built, does not appear. Sander Leendertsen's well is clearly indicated in 
the descriptions ; it stood some fifty feet in a northeasterly direction from his 
stone house, and its remains are perhaps yet under the building No. 215 Pearl 
Street. 



304 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

of Schenectady, after which date there is no evidence that he 
again resided in New York.^ A few years before this hitter 
date he is said to have parted with liis property in the Smits 
Vly, but if this were the case, he must have soon resumed it, 
possibly by virtue of a mortgage upon it. The place seems 
for many years to have been in the possession of various 
tenants. About the time of the surrender to the English in 
1664, the house appears to have been occupied by one James 
Webb, a Londoner, as a tavern or lodging-house with the 
sign of Saint George and the Dragon.^ 

At the frontier settlement of Schenectady, Alexander 
Lindesay, or Glenn, spent the last twenty years of his life. 
His house, like those of the rest of the settlers, was within the 
stockaded village, but his land embraced a tract of nearly 
a thousand acres of fertile meadows on the north side of the 
Mohawk River, and to this he gave the name of Nova Scotia. 
Alexander did not live to witness the massacre of his neigh- 
bors in 1690 by the French and Indians ; he had died about 
five years before that event. The members of his family, 
however, were treated with respect by the French command- 
ant. Feelings of humanity, and possibly some Jacobite pro- 
pensities in the Scotch blood of the Glenns, had induced them 
to show kindness to certain Frenchmen who had been taken 
prisoners by the English in the war which Louis XIV. was 
waging to restore James II. to the English throne ; and as a 
mark of gratitude, the Glenn house in Schenectady is said to 
have been spared by the express command of the French 
governor of Canada on the destruction of the rest of the vil- 
lage in 1690. 

1 In 1656 he acted as an agent at New Amsterdam for Jacob Flodder of Fort 
Orange, in the sale and conveyance by the latter of the lots in his speculative 
purchase of what was known as the Outhoek of the Damen farm. See ante, 
page 271. 

2 This will doubtless serve to explain the mysterious entry of the burgomas- 
ters in tlieir minutes, under date of March 31, 1665, at which time the citizens 
were called upon to declare how many soldiers of the garrison they were willing 
to lodge : " The Man of the Knight of St. George will take one." This record 
has puzzled many an inquirer. See Valentine's Manual N. Y., Com. Council 
1861, p. 610. 



THE GLENN MANSION, SCHENECTADY 805 

A more quiet state of affairs in the next century induced 
the Glenns to build the stately, albeit somewhat neglected old 
mansion which still stands upon their estate, on the north 
side of the Mohawk River at Schenectady. The stroller, 
crossing the long bridge over the Mohawk at Schenectady, 
and turning westward along the banks of the river, will see 
to his left, at the distance of half a mile or so from the 
bridge, — standing upon a low, grassy hillock overlooking 
the city and the broad meadows of the Mohawk with their 
curious purplish tinge of early summer, and the willowed 
islands and shores of that lake-like stream, — a square, stuc- 
coed house, with a flat, railed roof, bearing upon the front of 
the building, in iron letters, the date "A. O. 1713." Ancient 
trees surround the house, some of which may have stood there 
when Sander Leendertsen's descendants erected the building, 
"\ dthin less than thirty years from his death. It is one of the 
Eivtoric mansions of the State, and should not be allowed to 
perish. 

As for the propert}' of Sander Leendertsen in the Smits 
Vly, it was finally disposed of by him in the fall of 1675, — 
the easterly portion to Abraham Lambertsen Moll, and the 
larger western portion, with the original house, to Hendrick 
Vandewater. Certain adverse claims existed, as it would 
seem, against this property, for in 1674, we find one John 
Saffin sending a communication to Secretary Nicoll, complain- 
ing that " Henry Vandewater hath seruptitiously obtained a 
mortgage of old Sander Leendertsen of Albany on the stone 
house situated in the Smits Vly which was long before made 
over to, and hath been in the possession of Captain Thomas 
Willet and now pertains to his heires." He asks that Vande- 
water be prevented from exposing the premises for sale or 
otherwise prejudicing the said "heires" till they have an 
opportunity of protecting their interests. No action, how- 
ever, seems to have followed this communication, and Van- 
dewater and his family remained in the occupation of the 
property for many years. 

20 



306 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

At the portion of Smits Vly which we have now reached, 
the river front had been originally embraced in the farm of 
Secretary Van Tienhoven. He, however, had sold off various 
plots of the low-lying ground along the road, and one of these 
plots, which covered the sites of the present buildings Nos. 
225 to 231 Pearl Street, together with a portion of the 
modern Piatt Street,^ was conveyed by him in the year 1656 
to Willem Beeckman; it then contained a house, however, 
which in all probability stood there at the time of our survey. 
This plot of ground becomes of interest as having been for many 
years the residence and the seat of the brewing operations 
of Jan Vinje, as he was called among his Dutch neighbors (or 
Jean Vigne, as his parents would probably have called him), 
a leading citizen of New Amsterdam, and a man who, as 
there is every reason to believe, enjoys the distinction of hav- 
ing been the first child of European parentage born in New 
Amsterdam or in New Netherland. 

Our information upon this point is derived from the Jour- 
nal of the Labadist missionaries. Danker and Sluyter, who 
visited New York in 1679.^ While in the town they lodged 
with one Jacob Hellekers, the site of whose house is now 
occupied by the building No. 255 Pearl Street, near Fulton 
Street. They were therefore near neighbors to Jan Vinje, 
with whom they soon became acquainted. He was then, they 
tell us, about sixty-five years of age, a prominent man, well 
known to all the citizens, many of whom had themselves 
resided in the town and had been intimately acquainted with 
him for from thirty to forty years. It was the common 
understanding that he was the first person born in the colony, 
and the date of his birth would therefore go back to the 
year 1614. His parents, so the Labadists inform us, were 
Guillaume Vigne, and his wife, Adrienne Cuville, from 
Valenciennes in France. How they came to be at New 
Amsterdam in the early days of the trading-post we do not 

1 Piatt Street was opened iu the period between 1829 aud 1835. 

2 See their Journal (which we owe to the labors of Hon. Henry C. Murphy), 
in Vol. I. of the Memoirs of the Long Island Historical Society. 



JAN VINJE 307 

know, but there is certainly nothing improbable in the asser- 
tion that a trader or an officer of the post should have had his 
family with him at New Amsterdam. In the mouths of their 
Dutch neighbors, the husband became known as Willem 
Viiije, and his wife as Adriana Cuvilje. There is reason to 
believe that Willem Vinje was the first tenant of the farm 
laid out north of the present Wall Street by the West India 
Company, and that he died there. In 1632 his widow mar- 
ried Jan Jansen Damen, with whom the farm is more gener- 
ally associated. At the date last named, as we are informed 
by an instrument in the Albany records, of the four children 
of Willem Vinje and his wife, two were married, Maria (to 
Abraham Verplanck), and Christina (to Dirck Volckertsen), 
while two, Rachel and Jan, were " minors " : as both of the 
latter, however, were married within the next six years 
(Rachel to the Secretary Van Tienhoven), they must have 
been in the latter years of their minority in 1632, and the age 
of Jan Vinje, according to the Labadists, which would have 
been seventeen or eighteen at that time, is thus confirmed.^ 

The plot of ground we are considering, with its brew-house, 
came into the possession of Jan Vinje about the year 1664, 
that building having been erected a few years before, and at 
some date between 1656 and 1660 : it had passed through the 
hands of two or three individuals who do not appear to have 
met with success in its management, and Vinje probably 
acquired it through the foreclosure of a mortgage. A partial 
description of the premises has been preserved to us. At the 
southwestern corner of the plot, upon ground now partly 
embraced in Piatt Street and partly in the modern building 
No. 225 Pearl Street at the northwest corner of Piatt, stood 
its mill-house ; while the brewery itself appears to have occu- 
pied a rear position in the spacious enclosure which was about 

1 The statement has often been made that Sarah, the daughter of Joris 
Eapalje, was the first white child born in New Netlierland. This statement is 
based upon an allegation made by her in a petition to the Council asking for a 
grant of land in 1650, Without discussing the value of this document as evi- 
dence, an examination of it will show that she merely describes herself as " the 
first born Christian daughter in New Netherland." 



308 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

eighty feet front by one hundred and sixty in depth. Both of 
these buildings were erected a short time after the period of 
our survey ; but the dwelling-house itself, which in all prob- 
ability stood upon a part of the ground now covered by the 
buildings Nos. 227 and 229 Pearl Street, appears to have been 
constructed by Secretary Van Tienhoven in 1647. His build- 
ing contract with the carpenter Rynier Dominicus is stiU 
extant and affords some curious specifications. The house 
was to be thirty feet long by twenty feet wide on the inside ; 
it was to have an " outlet," or entry, " eight feet wide, right 
through." The " story of the front room, nine and one half 
feet high : that of the back room, twelve and one half feet " : 
with " five cross beams with girders and one without." The 
entry was to contain the usual " bedstead " built in. The 
exterior chimney was to be of timber ; and the beams of the 
small structure were to have the capacious cross dimensions of 
ten inches by seven. Vinje remained in possession of this 
property until the summer of 1684, when he sold it to Nicho- 
las de Meyer, in whose family it continued for many years. 
The old buildings seem to have been removed or destroyed 
before 1712, as a deed of the property, executed in that year,i 
mentions it as ground " upon which lately stood a messuage 
with a brew house and mill house." The premises remained, 
during the greater portion of the eighteenth century, only 
partly ouilt upon, and at the time of the British occupation of 
New York, during the War of the Revolution, they were 
occupied by the barracks of the Hessian troops. 

1 Lib, xxviii. cons., page 9, N. Y. Register's Office. 



CHAPTER XXII 

SECRETARY VAN TIENHOVEN'S BOUWERY OF " WALLEN- 
STEIN." — THE GOUWENBERG. — VAN TIENHOVEN'S 
LANE. — THE VANDERCLYFF FAMILY 

O Earth, what changes hast thou seen ! 
There where the long street roars, hath been 
The stillness of the central sea. 

The hills are shadows, and they flow 
From form to form, and nothing stands ; 
They melt like mist, the solid lands, 
Like clouds they shape themselves and go. 

Tennyson : " In Memoriam." 

AS one passes along the modern John Street, between 
Cliff and Pearl streets, he sees, upon the north side of 
the first-named street, a row of small shops, gradually dimin- 
ishing in depth, till they terminate almost in a point at the 
corner of Pearl Street. Through the windows of these dimin- 
utive structures one can catch a glimpse of a sickly looking 
tree or two in an interior enclosure, and is apt to wonder at 
tills bit of rus in urhe at such a spot. Beyond the diagonal 
line which marks the north side of these shops, a gated alley- 
way and stairs of correspondingly diminutive size leads to some 
mysterious region within, which would seem to be perforce 
a closed district to all individuals of a corpulent habit. 
Many persons have doubtless wondered at this odd nook, so 
much of the character of those which Charles Dickens delighted 
in for the scenes of his novels ; but it is safe to say that very 
few indeed have recognized in the line of these buildings one 
of the oldest landmarks in New York, or have known that it 
marked the north side of the lane which once led from the 



310 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

river shore up the hill to Secretary Van Tienhoven's ancient 
bouwery house. 

Standing, about the year 1655, at the junction of this lane 
with the river road, — or at the corner of the modern John and 
Pearl streets, — and looking up the broad, grassy lane (of 
nearly the width of the present John Street), one saw before 
him at the top of a moderate ascent, a low-roofed Dutch farm- 
house, with its stoep, its swinging half-doors, its small-paned 
and heavy-shuttered windows, and its capacious exterior 
chimneys ; a little way to the right (or east) of the building, 
the spectator saw its outer cellar, partly excavated in the hill, 
and partly sodded over. Within the lane, at the foot of the 
hill, was a spring or well, to which a well-worn path led down 
from the farmhouse. On the left of the lane, and occupying 
a warm southeastern exposure upon the slope of the hill, was a 
garden of large size, — probably of at least an acre in area, — 
the site of which is now traversed by the modern Piatt Street. 
This garden appears to have been hired by the West India 
Company after the disturbance of its prior garden upon the 
west side of Broadway, caused by the erection of the " forti- 
fications" in 1653.1 Back of this garden was a somewhat 
rough hillock used for pasturage purposes ; along its wet and 
springy sides the common celandine displayed its yellow 
flowers thickly ; this plant was called by the Dutch the gouwe, 
and the hill became known as the Gouwenberg, which name 
was in the course of time corrupted by the English into 
Golden Hill, from which the present irregular street called 
Gold Street took its origin. The lower portion of that street 
appears to have been originally a lane giving access from Maagde 
Paetje, or Maiden Lane, to the pasture field just spoken of. 

To the north and east of the bouwery house, which must 
have stood just about at the northwestern angle of the present 
John and Cliff streets, lay its orchard, apparently of two or 
three acres in area ; twenty-five years of growth in a new 
soil must have given its trees a fair size at the period of our 

1 In 1656, lots upon the modern Pearl Street at that point are bounded on the 
north " by the clapboards of the Company's garden." 



VAN TIENHOVEN'S LANE 311 

survey ; and to the Dutch traveller, passing by on his way to 
the Long Island ferry, these trees on the hill above him, white 
with their fragrant blossoms in May, or loaded with their red 
and yellow fruit in autumn, perhaps called to mind the 
orchards of Beveland, or of Gooiland in the old country. 
Between the orchard and the low ground of the Smits Vly 
ran the farm lane above described, which, turning at right 
angles at the farmhouse, skirted the brow of the hill ; as 
widened, it forms the modern Cliff Street, between John and 
Fulton streets. At a point which corresponds with the inter- 
section of the present Cliff and Fulton streets, the lane of 
Van Tienhoven's farm came to the declivity of a ravine or 
gully which formed the division between this farm and the 
land which belonged at the time of our survey to Thomas 
Hall, but which is better known from its later owner, William 
Beeckman, as the Beeckman estate ; to avoid this it appears 
to have again turned westwards, running along what is now 
Fulton Street as far as the turn in that street, at the inter- 
section of the gloomy-looking cul-de-sac, known at present 
as Rider's Alley; thence it ran into the lower end of the 
present Ann Street, which it followed out to the Heerewegh, 
or the modern Broadway. The object of this lane was evi- 
dently to afford means of access, not only to the farther 
portions of Van Tienhoven's farm, but also to the common 
pasture occupying the present Park and vicinity ; although its 
western half was supposed to skirt Van Tienhoven's farm, 
it had been carelessly laid out as a track through the woods, 
and this fact gave rise to the regulation of the lane (or modern 
Ann Street) in the year 1642, at wliich time the adjoining 
land was sold by the West India Company to Govert Loocker- 
mans and Cornells Leendertsen.^ 

^ The deed from the Director and Council to Loockermana and Leendertsen, 
dated March 26, 1642, contains the following provisions relating to this lane: 
" And since from old time to now, between the land which we sell to Loockermans 
and Cornelis Leendertsen, and the farm of Cornelis van Tienhoven, there has been 
a wagon road running to tlie Great Highway ; it is expressly ordered that as 
long as the said Loockermans and Leendertsen shall not have enclosed their 
purchased laud all around, sufficiently tight against cattle, then Cornelia van 



312 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

This bouwery is spoken of as belonging to Cornelis van 
Tienhoven as early as the year 1640, though he did not receive 
his formal ground-brief or patent for it until 1644. He was 
not, however, the first owner or tenant of the farm, which was 
inall probability laid out at a very early date, and its buildings, 
perhaps, erected by the West India Company. 

It was the fashion among the Dutch at this time to give to 
their bouwerys special names, and many such examples are 
found in New Netherland, sometimes taken from Indian 
names, as Werpoes or Gamoenepa ; at others from some topo- 
graphical or other peculiarity connected with the tract, as 
Corlaers Hoek, the Malle Smits Berg, Deutel Bay, the 
Bassen Bouwery, Krom Moeras, the Great Bouwery, the 
Otterspoor, etc. ; while others were purely fanciful appellations, 
as Zegendal or Vredendal : in this manner the farm we are 
considering had received at a very early day the name of 
Wallenstein, 

It might at first sight seem strange that in a Protestant 
community a farm should have been thus designated in honor, 
as it undoubtedly was, of the great historical personage then 
recently at the head of the Romanist party of Europe and of 
the troops of the German Empire, assembled to put down the 
Protestant states of that country. It must not be forgotten, 
however, that during the last portion of his life and after his 
assassination, Wallenstein came to be popularly regarded as a 
secret friend to the Protestant cause, whose untimely death 
alone prevented him from carrying out vast and mysterious 

Tienhoven shall have the privilege of using the aforesaid road beyond his pali- 
sades (as having been a road for a length of time) with wagon and horses. But 
when the said land have been sufBciently cleared by Loockermans and Leendertsen 
and shall have been enclosed with a sufficient fence, which must be kept up by 
them, then the wagon road shall run exactly as the palisades of Tienhoven's 
land stand, of which the said Loockermans and Leendertsen shall give one-half of 
the land for the breadth of the road ; and in like manner Cornelis van Tienhoven 
shall give one-half thereof, which aforesaid road shall be used equally, serving 
only as an outlet to the Long Highway, as their own private road." This lane 
was only laid out from " the Long Highway " towards the East River as far as 
a point at the intersection of the present Gold and Ann streets, Loockermans* 
apd Leendertseii's land terminating at that place, 




A I'Aiii oi \'an Tikmiovkn's Lank, 1002. 
Ann Street between William and Gold. 



THE " WALLENSTEIN " BOUWERY 313 

schemes which would have transformed Germany into a great 
Protestant Empire. Whether this belief was sufficiently jus- 
tified by facts can in all probability never be determined. It 
existed, however, in the minds of many, and in the year 1638 
we find Barent Dircksen Swart, who then appears to have 
been in occupation of this farm, making a lease for six years 
to " Cornells Jacobsen, the elder, from Mertensdyk and Cor- 
nells Jacobsen, the younger, his brother," ^ of " the Bouwery 
named Walensteyn," with all its " stock of cows, heifers, 
mare, stallions, wagons, etc." The yearly rental of this farm 
to be paid by the lessees was to be one hundred and fifty 
pounds of butter and fifty schepels of grain, whether wheat, 
rye, or barley. Although the Indian troubles were still in the 
future, the lessees had not forgotten the unprotected state of 
the farm, for they continue thus, in the lease : " It being well 
understood, should the house come to be burned unfortunately 
either by hostile Indians or others, if it do not happen by the 
fault of the lessees, the lessor shall stand the risk of the in- 
cendiary." 

As for the lessor Barent Dircksen, he himself had not been 
the first occupant of the " Wallenstein " bouwery, but he had 
purchased it from Antony Jansen of Vees, from whom he 
received a deed for it in 1639, after he had been some time in 
actual possession of the farm. The tenure of the bouwery 
both by Jansen and by Dircksen was, it is quite evident, not 

1 The writer is inclined to the belief that this second Cornelis Jacobsen is no 
other than the Secretary Cornelis van Tienhoven himself, whose patronymic, 
hitherto unknown, would thus appear. The village of Mertensdyk, or St. Martins- 
dyke, is only about four miles from that of Tienhoven, both places being little 
more than that distance from the ancient city of Utrecht in the Netherlands. 
The inconvenient similarity of names would be alone sufBcient to account for the 
disuse of his family name by Van Tienhoven. We would also under this hy- 
pothesis have a ready explanation of the fact that the farm is called Van Tien- 
hoven's four years before he obtained his ground-brief for the same, and while it 
was yet apparently under the claim of ownership of Barent Dircksen. It may 
be also mentioned, for what it is worth, that in the family of Cornelis Jacobsen 
van Mertensdyk, better known in the records of the colony as Cornelis Jacobsen 
Stille, occurs the not very common name of Aefje or Effie (Eva), the same as 
that of Cornelis van Tienhoven's sister, the wife of Pieter Stoutenburgh. 



314 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

absolute, but merely a conditional and future right to owner- 
ship, such as was frequently granted to the colonists by the 
West India Company. The farmers were allowed to take 
possession of a tract — sometimes partly improved, and some- 
times not — with the stipulation that upon their performing 
certain conditions, such as clearing of timber and bringing 
under cultivation a certain number of acres, or erecting build- 
ings and fences of a specified character within a given term, 
often ten years, they should be entitled to receive an absolute 
deed or ground-brief for the property from the company. 

Of Barent Dircksen, the lessor of this farm, not much is 
known, except that he was a middle-aged man, a baker by 
trade, and is said in some of the records to have come from 
" Noorden," which is likely enough a misspelling of the old 
town of Naerden on the Zuyder Zee, some sixteen or seven- 
teen miles north of Utrecht. The relations between him and 
the lessees of his farm do not appear to have been entirely 
harmonious, for upon the 26th of August, 1642, at an unusual 
period of the year for the execution of a farm lease, and con- 
siderably before the expiration of the Jacobsen brothers' lease, 
we find him making a new one to Bout Francen, of Naerden, 
for " the bouwery called Walestyn," at an annual rental of 
eighty pounds of butter, twenty schepels of wheat, and forty 
of rye. This transaction seems to have led to the purchase of 
Barent Dircksen's rights in the farm by Secretary Van Tien- 
hoven, for upon the 13tli of May of the next year 1643,^ 
Cornells van Tienhoven executes a lease to Cornells Jacobsen 
Stille of " his bouwery in the Smits Vly " for three or six 

1 Dircksen appears upon the sale of this farm to have retired from active 
farming operations, for a time at least, or to have taken refuge in the town from 
the Indians. In the fall of the year 1643, he purchased from Harck Syboutsen a 
email house nearer the fort for the sum of 175 guilders or $70 (probably above 
some incumbrance), "and a half-barrel of beer as a treat for the company." The 
parties do not seem in this transaction to have considered the carrying out of the 
sale as of vital importance, but it is provided with great care in the instrument 
" if either of the parties backs out or repeuts of the sale, he shall pay a half- 
barrel of beer." Barent Dircksen died before 1647, in which year we find his 
widow married to Harman Smeeman, who had a small farm on the East River 
shore adjoining the Stuyvesant plantation. 



VAN TIENHOVEN'S FARM 315 

years ; Bout Francen, the former lessee, having been provided 
with a lease of Johannes la Montagne's bouwery of Vreden- 
dal (at the north end of the present Central Park), from 
which, in the course of a few months, he was routed out by 
the Indians. Van Tienhoven's lease affords some curious 
particulars of the condition in 1643 of this tract of land situ- 
ated between the modern Maiden Lane, Ann Street, Broad- 
way, and Pearl Street, and now so densely built upon with 
stores, warehouses, and office buildings ; its fields had then 
just been " fenced and railed in a proper manner," but por- 
tions of it were still open and covered with wood or brush, for 
the lessee agrees " every year to clear a piece of land and let it 
he fallow; any land added, to be fenced as at present." The 
Secretary further agrees to build a hay or grain barrack upon 
the farm for his tenant. 

Cornells Jacobsen Stille appears to have remained as a 
tenant in tlie occupation of this farm till the year 1647, when 
he removed to the farm known as " Bouwery Number Six," 
which he had purchased of the West India Company, and 
which lay between the present Division Street and the East 
River. It was in the same year that Secretary Van Tien- 
hoven, who had obtained a formal ground-brief for his 
bouwery from Director-General Kieft three years before that 
date, built the house upon the shore road which has already 
been alluded to (ante^ page 308) as the later residence of the 
Secretary's brother-in-law, Jan Vinje. Either in this house, 
or in the farmhouse on the hill, the Secretary and his family 
may have dwelt during the next five or six years, and in the 
immediate vicinity he seems to have taken some interest in 
establishing several of his relatives by marriage, for in the 
year 1649 he sold, to two of his brothers-in-law, Abraham 
Verplanck and Dirck Volckertsen, small plots of ground upon 
the Shore Road in the northeastern corner of his farm near 
the intersection of the present Pearl and Fulton streets, 
where, with one or two other persons, they built a small 
cluster of houses, of which some notice will be taken hereafter. 
In 1653, however, Van Tienhoven purchased the house on 



316 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

't Water, or the modern Pearl Street, next to the old Dutch 
church ^ which thenceforth became his residence ; and there is 
no evidence that the bouwery of " Wallenstein " was ever 
again the dwelling-place of any of the Secretary's family, 
though it remained in their possession, and evidently occu- 
pied by farmer tenants for nearly a score of years after the 
death or disappearance of the Secretary in 1656. 

Some of the subsequent changes coming to this property 
may be not without interest. In 1671 the representatives of 
the estates of Van Tienhoven and of his wife sold the farm 
to one Jan Smedes, who held it a few years ; but in 1675, 
Smedes sold the rear fields of the farm, extending to Broad- 
way from a line parallel with the modern Gold Street, and 
about one hundred feet west of it, to Coenrad Ten Eyck, 
Carsten Luersen, John Harpendinck, and Jacob Abrahamsen, 
four shoemakers and tannei'S of the town, who desired to 
establish their tan-pits in the low ground along Maiden Lane, 
at the southeastern angle of their purchase. The land used 
for this purpose was of but small extent, and the balance of 
the tract of seventeen acres, after deducting certain small gar- 
den plots along Broadway, was used for pasturage purposes 
for about twenty years, forming the well-known topographical 
feature of the early town, known as the " Shoemakers' Field." 
In 1696, the present streets were run through this tract ; it 
was divided into a number of lots which were distributed 
among the partners in the purchase, and were slowly sold off 
by them for small prices, averaging perhaps $100 each, of the 
present currency. 

The old bouwery house, with about five or six acres of 
land, was sold by Smedes to Hendrick Rycken, a blacksmith, 
in 1677 ; and four years later Rycken parted with the property 
to a man, who, with his family, is perhaps more closely asso- 
ciated with the place than any of its former owners.^ This 

^ See ante, page 55, etc. 

2 There was a tradition, some time ago, among the members of the Eiker 
family, that their ancestor sold this place out of disgust at the snakes then in- 
festing the wet grounds about the Gouwenberg and Smits Vly. As, however, he 



THE VANDERCLYFF FAMILY 317 

was Dirck Jansen Vanderclyff, who appears to have come 
from the village of Alphen, a few miles southeast of the 
swamp-environed fortress of Breda, in Brabant. At New 
York, he married Geesje, the daughter of Hendrick Willemsen, 
a baker who long resided at the northwest corner of the pres- 
ent Bridge and Broad streets. In the old farmhouse this 
family resided for many years, and its broad lane leading down 
the hill to the waterside must have been well trodden by the 
eight or ten small Vanderclyffs, or " Van Cleefs," as they 
came to be called. Before 1695, Dirck Vanderclyff had died, 
and his energetic widow set about selling off her property 
here, in lots. The old farm lane running along the brow of 
the hill parallel with the river road formed one of her streets, 
and its turn at right angles formed another one which she 
designed to lead into one of the new streets which the Shoe- 
makers were laying out, at about this time, on their adjoining 
property. Geesje was an American-born woman, but she had 
a great admiration for her father's country, and for its great 
Stadtholder, who was then filling so prominent a place in the 
eyes of the world, — William of Nassau, Prince of Orange. 
The Shoemakers, upon their adjoining property, had named 
one of their streets William Street, but the rest of the Stadt- 
holder's title was open to Geesje, and she called the lane at 
the top of the hill — scarcely four hundred feet in length — 
Orange Street, while the other, of not much greater length, 
she designated Nassau Street. In course of tune those names 
came to be applied to streets of greater length and of more 
importance, in other parts of the town. For want of a gen- 
erally accepted name, her " Orange Street " was generally 
known as Vanderclyff's, or Van Cleefs Street, whence its 
modern name of Cliff Street, while " Nassau Street " became 
merged in Fair Street, of the " Shoemaker's Pasture," now 
Fulton Street. 

In the old farmliouse here Geesje Vanderclyff lived many 
years, — she resided here certainly as late as 1711, — and Mr. 

purchased the property for 2900 guilders and sold for 5000 guilders, — a neat 
advance for those days, — the snake story is not needed to explain the sale. 



318 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

D. T. Valentine has found some reason to believe that she kept 
a tavern here. Her husband, Dirck, undoubtedly did, during 
his lifetime, establish a place of resort at " The Orchard ; " 
and it was here, in 1682, that James Graham, afterwards 
Recorder of the City, and Attorney-General of the province, 
was mysteriously stabbed, in the midst of a social party and 
apparently without cause, by Captain Baxter, an English 
officer whom he was entertaining, — the wound, however, not 
proving very serious. Of Geesje's large family, six daughters 
reached years of maturity, and among them was divided what 
remained of the place at their mother's death. Most of them 
had married persons of English descent, and the Dutch charac- 
teristics of the Vanderclyffs soon disappeared.^ 

It may be noted that upon land immediately adjoining the 
Vanderclyff farmhouse, and in all probabilit}'' upon a portion 
of what had been its barnyard, was erected at some time 
within the period from 1724 to 1728 the first church building 
of the Baptists in New York City. It had a very ephemeral 
existence as a church edifice, being claimed as private prop- 
erty and soon closed by one of its first trustees. It appears, 
however, as late as upon the map of 1755 as the " Baptist 
Meeting." 2 

1 Of the children of Dirck and Geesje Vanderclyff, Cornelia was married to 
Benjamin Norwood in 1693; Catharine to Jolin Lowry or Loring, in or about 
1694 ; Lysbet to John Bruce in 1696 ; Margaretlia to Peter Burtell, or Brutell, in 
1704; Femmetje,"or Euphemia, to Andries Hardenbrook in 1709; Maria, a twin 
daughter, grew to maturity, but does not appear to have married. 

2 See manuscript of Rev. Morgan Edwards as cited by Rev. Wm. Parkinson in 
his sketch of the " Origin of the First Baptist Churcii in the City of New York." 



CHAPTER XXIII 

THE HAMLET AT THE FERRY.— LAMBERT MOLL. — HAGE 
BRUYNSEN, THE SWEDE. — DIRCK VOLCKERTSEN AND 
HIS BROTHER-IN-LAW, ABRAHAM VERPLANCK. — THOMAS 
HALL'S PLACE 

By hedge-row elms, ou hillocks green, 
Higlit against the Eastern gate, 
Where the great sun begins his State, 
Robed in flames, and amber light 
The clouds in thousand liveries dight. 

Milton : " L'Allegro." 

FROM his farmhouse on the hill, Secretary Van Tienhoven 
could look down upon a row of five houses standing in 
close proximity to one another in the Smits Vly, and at the 
southeastern angle of his estate. These buildings, together 
with the neighboring house of Thomas Hall, the warehouse 
of Isaac Allerton, and the ferry-house of Eghbert van Borsum, 
formed a small hamlet often spoken of simply as "The 
Ferry." 

In the summer of 1649, the Secretary had sold three plots 
of ground upon the river road, and near the intersection of 
the modern Pearl and Fulton streets, to two of his brothers- 
in-law, Abraham Verplanck and Dirck Volckertsen, and to 
one Lambert Huybertsen. These plots contained nearly half 
an acre each, and extended back from the river road to the 
high ground in their rear. Volckertsen soon subdivided his 
parcel, and sold to persons who built upon their plots, so that 
the previously isolated state of the Secretary's farmhouse was 
somewhat relieved. 

The first of these buildings, going towards the ferry, at the 
time of our survey, was the house of Lambert Huybertsen 



820 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

Moll, to whom sometimes the designation of "klomp," or 
wooden shoe, was given, — probably either from his wearing 
or manufacturing those useful articles. His house seems to 
have stood about upon the site of the present building, No. 
253 Pearl Street, and was built, in all probability, about the 
time of his acquiring the land in 1649. He seems to have 
brought his family with him from the Netherlands, though from 
what particular place is uncertain, one of his sons, Hendrick, 
appearing in the records as of Amsterdam, and another, 
Huybert, of Aernhem, on the lower Rhine. Of Lambert's 
life in New Amsterdam not much is known. He was weak 
enough, on one occasion, to appear with " just a drappie in 
the e'e " before the Court of Burgomasters, at the Stadt 
Huys, duiing the progress of a suit by him against Isaac Kip ; 
the indignant court promptly vindicated its outraged dignity 
by fining the offender the sum of six guilders, equivalent to 
two dollars and forty cents, and turning him out of its 
presence. Nevertheless, Lambert appears to have been a man 
of a humane and kindly disposition. There is some evidence 
that he followed the occupation of a boat-builder or boatman,^ 
and upon the occurrence of the Indian panic of 1655 he loaned 
one of his scows to the frightened inhabitants of Gamoenepa, 
or Communipaw, across the North River, for the purpose of 
ferrying over their cattle to Manhattan Island. The refugees 
gave themselves, upon this occasion, no concern about return- 
ing the vessel to its owner, but simply abandoned it, and 
Lambert experienced much trouble in recovering its posses- 
sion. Lambert Huybertsen seems to have resided in this 
house until his death, which took place some time before the 
year 1676, at which period the property was sold to Elias 
Puddington, or Purington, a prominent shipwright in the 
early days of the English r^gime.^ 

1 In 1656 Lambert Moll was ordered by the Council to make an examination 
and report upon the condition of a vessel from Virginia then in the harbor. 

2 Lambert Huybertsen and his son Reyer were the owners of a tract of land 
embracing about one hundred and fifty acres, which extended along the East River 
from the marshes of the Wallabout nearly to the present North First Street, in 



DIRCK VOLCKERTSEN ^2l 

Closely adjoining the house of Lambert Huybertsen, in 
an easterly direction, and apparently upon the site of No. 
255 Pearl Street, was the small house of Hage (sometimes 
called Hacke, and sometimes Auke) Bruynsen, a Swede, whom 
we find at New Amsterdam in the early part of 1653, when 
he married Anneken Jans, a Danish woman from Holstein. 
In the fall of the same year he purchased a small slip of 
ground here from Dirck Volckertsen, and seems to have built 
upon it at once. Bruynsen was from the Province of Sma- 
land in the southern part of Sweden ; it was at the head of 
the famous Smaland Cavalry that Gustavus Adolphus, King 
of Sweden, met his death at LUtzen, in 1632 ; and for aught 
we know, Bruynsen, as a trooper in the Swedish squadrons, 
may have confronted his neighbor, Augustyn Heermans, 
in Wallenstein's army, on that memorable day. Bruynsen 
died about the year 1668, and two years later his house was 
sold to one Jacob Hellekers, familiarly known as " black 
Jacob." The house is of some interest, as the lodging-place, 
in 1679, of the Labadist missionaries. Danker and Sluj-ter, 
whose interesting journal of their experiences in the New 
World was brought to light by Hon. Henry C. Murphy some 
years ago.^ 

Next beyond the house of Hage Bruynsen stood, in 1655, 
the residence of Dirck Volckertsen, the brother-in-law of 
Secretary Van Tienhoven, — not his original house at this 
place, built upon his acquiring the land in 1649 from the 
Secretary, but a later one, which he appears to have built for 
himself about 1651, at which time he had sold his first house 
to Roeloff Teunissen. Dirck Volckertsen, at the time of our 
survey, was in the later years of his life, and was in all prob- 
ability at this time, the earliest European settler living in 
the colony. In considering him, we are going back to the 
days of the blockhouse and trading-post, with which he must 

Brooklyn, thus covering about one-half of the modern Williamsburgh. Lambert's 
patent was acquired as early as 1641. Within twenty or twenty-five years, 
however, both father and son had disposed of their holdings on Long Island. 

1 See the translated Journal in Vol. I., Memoirs Long Island Historical 
Society. 

21 



822 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

have been familiar. In the year 1621 we find Dirck Volckert- 
sen and Cornells Volckertsen (who was in all probability his 
brother), together with certain other persons, presenting a 
petition to the States-General of the Netherlands, praying for 
permission to send a ship over to New Netherland, " with 
all sorts of permitted merchandise," and it was, in all proba- 
bility, in pursuance of this design that the two Volckertsens 
came over to the colony. These men, at the period of their 
mercantile venture, were residents of Hoorn, on the peninsula 
of North Holland, but they appear to have been Danes, or 
Scandinavians by birth,^ and Dirck was closely associated 
in New Netherland with the Swedes and Norwegians in the 
colony. How the Volckertsens spent their earlier years in 
New Netherland we do not know. When they are first met 
with in the records of the colony, about 1644, Cornells was 
residing upon the east side of the Heerewegh, or Broadway, 
upon a grant which he had obtained there a short time before, 
and through which the modern Exchange Place runs. Here 
he seems to have kept a tavern for a short time, but he died 
before 1650, in which year his widow married Jan Peeck, of 
whom previous mention has been made.^ 

Dirck at this time was living apparently in the house after- 
wards known as Sergeant Litscho's tavern, upon the road 
along the East River, with which he owned a small plot of 
land. He had married, before 1632, Christina, daughter of 
Guillaume Vigne, or Willem Vinje, and step-daughter of Jan 
Damen, but he does not appear to have been on the best of 
terms with his wife's family, and especially with his step- 
father, Jan Damen. In 1645 he disposed of his place along 
the river road ; but four years later, having obtained a grant 
of land from his brother-in-law, Secretary Van Tienhoven, at 
the place in tlie Smits Vly at which we liave now arrived, 

^ The name " Volckertsen " seems to be a refinement by the Dutch npon 
" Holgersen," by which name Dirck is occasionally designated. Holger, or Ogier, 
the Dane, living in the time of Charlemagne, is a great legendary hei-o of Den- 
mark, and it was possibly to the story of his ghost, which haunted the Castle of 
Elsinore, that we owe Shakespeare's " Hamlet." 

'^ See arite, page 301. 



THE NORMAN'S KILL 323 

be built a bouse wbicb must bave stood upon tbe wbole or a 
part of tbe site of the modern building, No. 259 Pearl Street. 

Tbis, witb one-balf of bis garden of ninety-two feet front, 
extendintif back sometliino- over two bundred feet to tbe bill 
upon wbicb tbe farmbouse of bis brother-in-law stood, be 
disposed of within a couple of years to a Swedish sea captain 
named Roeloff Teunissen, as above stated, and be then 
erected upon tbe site of the present building. No. 257 Pearl 
Street, tbe house wbicb he occupied at the time of our survey. 

In 1645 Dirck Volckertsen received a patent for tbe lands 
along the East River, which form tbe modern Greenpoint; 
from tbe appellation of " The Norman " frequently given to 
him, the kill on the south side of bis grant, known in late 
times as tbe Busbwick Creek, was in tbe seventeenth century 
usually spoken of as tbe Nomian's Kill. Through tbis tract 
of land a long lane or wood road stretched up from the river 
through the forest to tbe spot where, in later years, tbe ham- 
let of Bushwick grew up. Volckertsen seems to bave culti- 
vated a portion of this tract, probably residing at bis house in 
tbe Smits Vly, and like many of the other farmers along tbe 
shore, sailing to and from tbe scene of bis agricultural labors, 
witb bis sons and work hands. In 1653 be conveyed to 
Jacob Haie, or Haes, who appears to bave been tbe husband 
of bis daughter, Christina, that portion of tbe tract lying 
north of tbe lane just mentioned, but Haes had hardly estab- 
lished himself here, when in the fall of 1655, bis bouse was 
burned by tbe Indians, as has been already mentioned.^ 
After the cessation of tbe Indian troubles, Dirck Volckertsen 
appears to bave removed to bis farm at the Norman's Kill, for 
in a deed of 1661 be describes himself as of "Busbwyk. " 
The entire tract eventually came into the hands of tbe Mese- 
role family, descendants of Dirck's daughter Christina, who 
held it until recent years, and may still hold some portions of 
it. 

The occupant of Dirck Volckertsen's original bouse upon 
the parcel of ground in the Smits Vly, who was still bis 
1 tjee a7ite, page 169, 



324 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

neighbor at the time of our survey, was, as has been stated, 
one Roeloff Teunissen. This man came from where Gothen- 
burg looks out from among its bare hills of gray granite 
upon the blue waters of the broad Cattegat which separates 
Sweden from Denmark. The old city of the Goths was then, 
as now, one of the principal seaports of Sweden, and, like 
many of its natives, Roeloff Teunissen was a seafaring man. 
In 1651 he had found employment in the Dutch service, and 
was then " Master of the ship the Emperor Charles." He re- 
sided here at his house in the Smits Vly till 1657, when he 
sold the premises to Jan Hendricks Steelman. 

The remaining house in Secretary Van Tienhoven's hamlet 
near " The Ferry " was, in 1655, that of his brother-in-law, 
Abraham Isaacsen Verplanck. This stood in a large garden, 
of about ninety feet front by two hundred feet in depth, and 
its site is believed to be covered by the modern Fulton 
Street.^ Verplanck was one of the earliest colonists, and before 
1632 had married Maria, the eldest daughter of Willem Vinje, 
and sister of Rachel, the Secretary's wife, and of Christina, 
the wife of Dirck Volckertsen. As to the particular occupa- 
tion of Verplanck we have but little information : as early 
as 1638 he had acquired a patent for the tract across the 
North River, called Pouwells Hoek, upon which the modern 
Jersey City stands, but he himself does not appear to have 
been engaged in farming operations. There are evidences 
that he was not a popular man in the community, for in 1642 
he incurred the wrath of the Director and Council by defi- 
antly tearing down one of the placards of ordinances posted 
by them. For this offence, enhanced by remarks considered 
" slanderous " by the authorities, the rather severe fine of 300 
guilders, or about $120, was imposed on him. On the other 
hand, his conduct in the following year in signing, Avith his 
wife's step-father, Jan Damen, and with Maryn Adriaensen, 
the petition for leave to attack the Wechquaskeek Indians 
brought him into great odium among the colonists, who con- 

1 This portion of Fulton Street was only opened through from Cliff Street 
to the East River a few years before 1817. 



THOMAS HALL 325 

sidered him as one of those who were directly responsible for 
the devastations committed by the natives in retaliation for 
the massacre by the Dutch. Verplanck lived for many years 
after he had built his house in the Smit's Vly in 1649, but 
whether he resided here constantly is not known, as there 
are indications that a portion of his time was spent at Fort 
Orange, or Albany. 

Looking eastward from Secretary Van Tienhoven's farm- 
house near the East River across a ravine, which marked the 
boundary of his farm, and which traversed the space between 
the modern Fulton and Beekman streets, one could see a 
small isolated hillock, containing some eight or nine acres of 
land, v/hich fell away, upon its farther side, into a hollow of 
swampy woodland, the site of which is still known by the 
name of " The Swamp," though the oaks and maples, the alders 
and swamp blackberries, of the Secretary's time have long 
since given way to dingy warehouses crammed with hides 
and leather, the odors of which fill the air where perhaps the 
Secretary may have sniffed the fragrance of the wild grape. 

This hillock (which is plainly discernible in the modern 
grade of Pearl Street, the ancient river road), pushing for- 
wards towards the East River, put an end to the low grounds 
of the Smits Vly, which extended from the palisades at Wall 
Street to this point. Upon the hill, at a spot which has not 
been accurately determined, but which must have been inter- 
mediate between the present Beekman and Ferry streets, 
stood, in 1655, the "house, brew-house, mill-house, with 
a horse-mill and other buildings " of the Secretary's neigh- 
bor, the Englishman Thomas Hall. Back of the buildings, 
upon ground extending from the modern Cliff Street to Gold 
Street, was a goodlj'- orchard, above which towered up, at its 
southwest corner, and just at the intersection of the modern 
Ann and Gold streets, the landmark long known as " The 
Great Tree." On the south side of the buildings, upon 
ground sloping towards the Smits Vly and the modern Fulton 
Street, was a large garden. At the time of our survey, this 
property had been very recently acquired by Thomas Hall, 



326 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

but it had a history extending some years back into the earlier 
days of the colony. As early as 1638, this parcel of land was 
in the possession of Philip du Trieux (or De Truy, as the 
Dutch generally designated hira), who was long the Court 
" Messenger," or marshal, at New Amsterdam. Philip was 
one of the older residents, and seems to have been one of the 
first, if not the very first to build upon the Bever Graft, or the 
modern Beaver Street, where for a number of jears he had a 
house. In 1640 he received his ground-brief or patent for 
the land adjoining Secretary Van Tienhoven's farm, and 
seems to have then resided upon it, for about that time he 
with several others of that vicinity make a formal contract 
with Claes Groen and Pieter Lievesen for the herding of 
their goats for a whole year, at the munificent sum of one 
guilder, or about forty cents per year for each goat. This 
important document is entered with much formality upon the 
Register of the Secretary of the Council. 

Philip de Truy had died some time before 1653 : he 
seems to have leased or to have contracted to sell this place 
to Nicholas Stilwel, for in 1649 we find the latter promising 
to furnish one Plenry Bresar with " palisades " enough to 
fence the premises along the river road, and within two years 
to furnish enough more to fence the other sides of the land, 
in consideration of which, Bresar acknowledges that " he has 
taken off the hands of Nicolaes Stillwell the land and dwell- 
ing house " in question. Bresar seems to have remained in 
possession of the place till about the year 1653, when he built 
a new house a short distance beyond the ierrj, on some land 
which he had acquired there, and the former dwelling-house 
of Philip de Truy, after one or two intermediate changes, 
was bought, in August, 1654, by Thomas Hall. 

This man, who was for nearly thirty-five years a prominent 
character at New Amsterdam, possesses a peculiar interest to 
us as having been with his partner, George Holmes, beyond 
any reasonable doubt the first English settlers in the present 
State of New York ; that honor has been claimed for Lion 
Gardiner, who acquired Gardiner's Island at the eastern end 
of Long Island, in 1639; but in 1638 Thomas Hall with 



HALi;S TOBACCO PLANTATION 327 

Holmes was in occupation of ex-Director Van Twiller's 
tobacco plantation at Sapokanican near the later Greenwich 
village, and in all probability they had been there for at least 
a year or two before that date. 

Plall, who was a native of Gloucestershire in the west of 
England, appears to have been one of a little band of colonists 
who, after a short sojourn in New England, concluded to 
establish themselves, without seeking any one's permission, 
in the lands claimed by the Dutch along the Delaware River. 
Made prisoners and brought to New Amsterdam in 1635, 
several of these colonists determined to become subjects of 
the Dutch and to establish themselves in New Amsterdam, 
and among these, as it is supposed, were both Hall and 
Holmes. In some way these men, though young, — Hall was 
born about in the year 1614, — had become familiar with the 
cultivation and curing of tobacco, and they accordingly 
commenced operations in partnership as tobacco-planters, by 
leasing Director Van Twiller's large bouwery, one of the 
best on the island. By 1639, they had been so successful 
that they determined to set up a plantation of their own on 
some suitable ground near the East River shore, at what was 
called Deutel Bay near the present Forty-sixth Street. In 
the next year the partners separated. Hall selling out for six- 
teen hundred pounds of tobacco his interest in the Deutel 
Bay farm to Holmes, who thereupon established himself upon 
that farm, which remained long in the possession of him and 
of his descendants. 

Thomas Hall remained till the beginning of 1647 upon ex- 
Director Van Twiller's plantation. When he first came to 
New Netherland he was an unmarried man, but in 1641 he 
married a distressed English widow who had found herself 
in the painful position of being left destitute and alone in a 
strange land and among a foreign people. This was Anna 
Mitford, from Bristol, not very far from the scenes of Hall's 
youth. She had been the wife of William Quick, who had 
recently died very poor. In a pathetic petition which she 
made to the Director and Council soon after her husband's 
death she shows that she "is an afflicted widow, in a strange 



328 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

land, without any means or effects to satisfy the creditors ; 
yea, even knows not where to lay her head, or to obtain 
a morsel of bread," — she therefore abandons all the very 
humble effects of her husband to his creditors. Her mar- 
riage with Thomas Hall seems to have been a fortunate one, 
and she survived him after thirty years of married life, most 
of which were spent at the house upon the river road to 
which we have just alluded. 

For many years Thomas Hall carried on his farming opera- 
tions upon Manhattan Island ; he seems, besides, to have been 
something of a speculator, and several large farms passed 
through his hands and were sold or exchanged by him. He 
appears to have been familiar with the language and customs 
of his Dutch neighbors, was generally respected and trusted 
by them, and was often associated with them in business or 
speculation. In 1651 he was appointed one of the curators 
of the estate of Jan Jansen Damen, and seems to have suc- 
ceeded in reconciling the conflicting interests of Damen's 
heirs in the Netherlands with those of his stepchildren in 
New Amsterdam. In 1650 he was one of the delegates on 
behalf of the people in their application for a city government 
for New Amsterdam; and in 1668 he was one of the commis- 
sioners appointed to lay out and determine the most con- 
venient wagon-road to Harlem. 

After the death of Thomas Hall, in 1669, his widow sold 
in the following year the property on which she and her 
husband had long resided to Willem Beeckman, reserving a 
right during her life to one-half of its orchard. With the 
Beeckman family the place soon came to be popularly iden- 
tified, the land being known as " Beekman's orchard " long 
after the last apple or pear tree had vanished ; the modern 
Beekman Street, which traverses it, still aids in preserving 
the associations. As for Mrs. Anna Hall, after the sale of 
the property, she took up her residence in a house upon the 
south side of Wall Street, near Broad Street, where she is 
found residing in 1674, but the time of her death is not 
ascertained. 



CHAPTER XXIV 

THE TOWN'S END AND BESTEVAERS KREUPELBOSCH. — 
ISAAC ALLERTON AND HIS WAREHOUSE.— LOOCKERMANS' 
FARM. — THE FERRY. — HARRY BRAZIER'S HOUSE. — 
DIRCK, THE POTTER 

There were also pastures covered with gray rocks, looking like sheep; the 
green woods in some places were intersected by fields of brown rye, or soft clover. 
On the whole it was a verdant scene, — greenness, like a hollow ocean, spread itself 
out before her ; the hills were green, the depths were green, the trees, grass, and 
weeds were green ; and in the forest, on the south margin of the pond, the dark- 
ness as the sun went down seemed to form itself into caverns and grottoes, and 
strange fantastic shapes in the solid greenness. Deep in those woods the blackcap 
and thrush still hooted and clang unweariedly ; she heard also the cawing of 
crows and the scream of the loon ; the tinkle of bells, the lowing of cows, and 
the bleating of sheep were distinctly audible. Her own robin, on the butternut 
below, began his long, sweet, many toned carol; tlie tree-toad chimed in with its 
loud, trilling chirrup; and frogs, from the pond and mill brook, crooled, 
chubbed, and croaked. — Judd's "Margaret." 

UPON some such summer evening as the author of 
" Margaret " has so graphically depicted, and amid 
very similar surroundings, it is not unlikely that there may 
have come to Thomas Hall — as he strolled, at about the 
period of our survey, in an unoccupied hour, through his 
young orchard on the hill back of his newly-acquired home on 
the East River shore, and as he looked over the quiet rural 
landscape spread out before him at the upper end of the village 
of New Amsterdam — memories of his old home in far away 
Gloucestershire. 

It was a distinctly English landscape : beyond the rear fence 
of his orchard, about at the present Gold Street, he saw as 
he looked northwards — toward where the tall newspaper build- 
ings of Printing House Square and the hurrying crowds at the 
entrance of the Brooklyn Bridge now present themselves — 



330 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

the fields of rye or of peas, of maize or of tobacco, of Govert 
Loockermans' farm, long hired of him and cultivated by a 
sturdy Dutch farmer, Hendrick Pietersen van Hasselt. Beyond 
the fence upon the farther side of these fields, which ran along 
the line of the present Chatham and Nassau streets, lay the 
broad stretch of the Common Pasture, where the cows from the 
town grazed among the scattered rocks and bushes, or from 
which, at the close of the day, they wended their way, under 
the guidance of their herdsman, in a leisurely procession down 
the Heerewegh and Maagde Paetje, toward the houses of their 
owners in the town. Beyond the commons again were the 
gently sloping fields of the Company's bouwery, west of the 
present Broadway : and the wooded hills of Hoboken, across 
the North River, closed the view in this direction. 

As the gazer at the above station turned farther to his 
right, he saw before him, beyond the same fields of Loocker- 
mans, — which curved, in a semicircular form, from the 
hedges of Van Tienhoven's lane down to the East River, — 
two rough, forest-covered elevations: one of these, at the 
distance of about half a mile from him, was the hill known as 
the Kalek (or Kolck) Hoek ; the other, somewhat nearer, was 
called (perhaps from a corruption by the Dutch of the English 
word " Catamount " ) Catiemuts Hoek, or hill.^ Between 
these two hills, and shaded by their trees, which dropped their 
butternuts, acorns, and hickory nuts into its waters, lay the 
beautiful little lakelet long known as the Kolck,^ and occa- 
sionally spoken of merely as the " Versche Water," or fresh 
water ; and around the base of the last-mentioned hill wound 
the narrow road or track leading to the bouwerys, situated 
farther up the island. Still farther to the right, the high 
grounds and Loockermans' fields fell away into a tract of a 
few acres of wet meadow-land, through which a small brook, 
forming an outlet in wet seasons to the Kolck, flowed sluggishly 
into the East River ; near the head of this meadow, and where 

1 Tlie former of these hills was long afterwards cut down in the grading of 
Broadway through it ; the latter in the grading of Chatham Street. 

2 Corrupted by the English into " Collect."' 



THE "SWAMP" 331 

the road crossed its stream and ascended the hill beyond, two 
or three small thatched cottages marked the site of the present 
Chatham Square ; and on the farther side of the meadow the 
ground rose again into the broad fields and orchards of the 
larger bouwerjs, laid out a score of years before by the West 
India Company, beyond which a curving line of wood-crested 
hills closed in the horizon. 

In this latter direction, however, the view of the observer 
from Thomas Hall's orchard was somewhat interfered with by 
the trees of a swampy hollow, or basin, which lay below him. 
This covered some four or five acres of ground, and was 
known as Bestevaers Kreupelbosch, or " the Old Man's 
Swamp." For some reason, possibly because it was considered 
worthless, it had never been granted to any person by the 
officers of the West India Company, although the land sur- 
rounding it had all been appropriated by various individuals ; 
and the Swamp lay, cut off from general access, a sort of 
" no man's land," of not much use except to the adjoining 
o^vners for the purpose of watering their cattle at its pools, 
or to shoot woodcock, — or those birds' poor relations, the 
" high holders," — in its muddy thickets. 

Whether because of copious springs which existed in the 
wet hollow of the Kreupelbosch, or which had formerly existed 
there before the clearing of the surrounding land, or whether 
because of the action of the ancient glaciers which had moulded 
this basin, a considerable depression, as of the bed of a stream 
of some size, led from the Swamp into the East River ; its 
traces may yet be seen in the grade of the modern Pearl Street 
at Peck Slip. This depression, extending out into the East 
River, formed a small cove or haven, upon one side of which, 
by a little docking and filling out, Isaac AUerton, the New 
England trader, obtained a site for his warehouse with sufficient 
depth of water to enable the coasting craft to come up to it; 
while upon the other side of the little cove lay the boats and 
scows of the ferry to Breucklj-^n. 

At the mention of the name of Isaac Allerton, every New 
Yorker of aristocratic proclivities feels, or at any rate might 



332 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

be expected to feel, a thrill of pride. Isaac AUerton was not, 
it is true, a permanent resident of New Amsterdam, but he 
spent much of his time at his establishment there ; and when 
the Dutch authorities wished to raise money from him by- 
imposts or contributions, they invariably spoke of him as an 
old and highly respected citizen. New York is relieved from 
the painful necessity of having to contemplate from a position 
of hopeless inferiority the exaltation of New England. In 
Isaac Allerton is the one small trickling stream of blue blood 
which flows to New York from the Pilgrims of the " May- 
flower," " that blessed band of the First Ship," as one of their 
numerous historians handsomely calls them. Isaac Allerton 
is, as it were, the little leaven which leavens the whole New 
York lump; and all New Yorkers have part and parcel in 
him: — 

" Auch ich war in Arcadien geboren. " 

In considering the life of Isaac Allerton, or Alderton, — as 
he is occasionally called, — we go, as we are accustomed to 
regard it, very far back into the past. Born in 1585, in 
the county of Suffolk in England, perhaps, — who knows ? — 
where the little village of Alderton, from its low rise of 
ground between the marshes of the Aide and the Deben, 
looks out to the southeastward upon the German Ocean, he 
was old enough to have remembered seeing the ceaseless 
march of the squads of volunteers, as they streamed through 
Ipswich on their way to the muster at Tilbury, to fight for 
England against the Spanish host on the great Armada, and 
in the Duke of Parma's transports. Perhaps, too, he had rec- 
ollections of that summer day when every hill-top along the 
shore of Suffolk was thronged with people watching the far- 
off cloud of Spanish galleons as they hurried northwards to 
escape the ships of Howard and Drake, while the alarm bells 
from the village churches were answering each other in all 
directions, and beacon-fires were blazing all along the coast. 

His associations may well, indeed, have gone still farther 
back. People of the second preceding generation could have 



ISAAC ALLERTON 333 

told him — and doubtless often did tell him — of the dark 
days in Suffolk under Bishop Bonner's persecutions, in the 
time of Queen Mary, for the AUertons were of good Protes- 
tant stock, and interested in these things ; Ralph Allerton 
and three companions were burned together at the stake, 
at Islington, in 1557, for shocking Bishop Bonner's religious 
sense by reading the proscribed " Communion Book." 

All Suifolk in Allerton's younger days was full of stories 
and reminiscences of the persecutions. Historic Hadleigh 
was not very far away, whose good vicar. Doctor Rowland 
Taylor, having been tried for heresj^ in London, was sent 
down into Suffolk to be burned at the stake in his own 
parish, as a wholesome example to his parishioners ; and the 
Suffolk people still told with reverence that pathetic story 
which through three centuries and more has never yet lost its 
pathos : 

" Coming within two miles of Hadleigh, he desired to 
liglit off his horse, which done he leaped and set a frisk 
or twain as men commonly do for dancing. ' Why, master 
doctor,' quoth the sheriff, ' how do you now ? ' He an- 
swered, ' Well, God be praised. Master Sheriff, never better ; 
for now I know I am almost at home. I lack not past two 
stiles to go over, and I am even at my Father's house !'"... 

At last, " ' What place is this,' he asked, ' and what 
meaneth it that so much people are gathered together?' It 
was answered, ' It is Oldham Common, the place where you 
must suffer, and the people are come to look upon you.' 
Then said he, ' Thanked be God, I am even at home ! ' " 

It was with early associations such as these that Isaac 
Allerton came, together with his wife Mary, and his three 
children, Bartholomew, Remember, and Mary, to Plymouth 
with the first colonists, in 1620. Of his history prior to 
that time but little is known. He was evidently a man of 
business experience, for soon after the landing he was chosen 
" assistant," or what might be called lieutenant-governor 
under Governor Bradford ; he was, moreover, a man of some 
means, for he is mentioned as one of the wealthiest of the 



334 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

colonists. His thatched dwelling-house on the south side of 
Leyden Street in Plymouth, opposite that of Governor Brad- 
ford, is shown with what is probably a substantial degree of 
accuracy in the imaginary view of old Plymouth painted by 
Mr. W. L. Williams. Its site is novv^ apparently occupied by 
the later Market Street, but the " delicate spring " at the 
rear of his house lot still flows into the old Town Brook as 
it did when he first drank of its waters. His name is com- 
memorated in one of the principal streets of Plymouth, and 
it is upon AUerton Street that the noble monument to the 
Pilgrims stands. 

Isaac Allerton was not exempted from the early trials of 
the Plymouth Colonists ; scarcely more than two months had 
elapsed from the landing, when his wife succumbed to the 
hardships of her life in the colony. Five years afterwards, 
in 1626, he married for his second wife the daughter of Elder 
William Brewster,^ by whom he had a son, Isaac, who, as 
well as his father, figures in the history of New Amsterdam. 
Allerton soon became engaged in trading ventures, — at first 
along the northeastern coast, as it would seem, — but these 
were not always successful; and in 1633 a trading house 
which he had at Machias, on the Maine coast, was destroyed 
by the French. Soon after this period he seems to have 
turned his attention to the southwestern coast and to the in- 
creasing importance of the Dutch trade at New Amsterdam. 
His ties at Plymouth had become loosened by the death of 
his second wife in 1633, and soon after the establishment of 
the New Haven colony, in 1638, we find him a resident of that 
place, where in 1646 he married his third wife, Joanna.^ 

In the mean time Isaac A Her ton's trading operations had 
led him at an early date to Ncav Amsterdam, where he was 

1 Fear Brewster, according to some of the biographers, but in the Plymoutli 
list the same person seems to be designated by the name of " Love." Besides this 
lady and Remember Allerton, that list contains the curious names of Desire 
Winter, Wrestling Brewster, Humility Cooper, Resolved White, and Oceanus 
Hopkins. 

2 It was this lady who, some time after the death of her husband, is said to 
have given shelter to the fugitive regicides, Goffe and Wlialley. 



ALLERTON'S WAREHOUSE 335 

soon brought into intimate business relations with the Dutch 
trader, Govert Loockermans. As early as 1642 we find him 
nesrotiatincT a sale to Loockermans and to one Cornelis Leen- 
dertsen, for the sum of 1100 carolus guilders (equivalent to 
about $450) of his bark " The Hope," reserving the riglit of 
a return voyage in her to the Rodeberch, or Red Hill, as the 
Dutch called New Haven. In the next year, he and Loock- 
ermans jointly took a grant from the Director and Council of 
a parcel of ground on the east side of the present Broadway, 
a short distance north of Beaver Street, which ground, as has 
abeady been observed,^ may have been intended as a site for a 
warehouse, but which was never used for such a purpose, 
having been sold by the grantees within a few years after its 
acquisition. 

As early as 1646 or 1647, however, Allerton had made 
arrangements to establish a permanent trading house in New 
Amsterdam, which was under the immediate supervision of a 
clerk or agent, George Woolsey, from Yarmouth in England. 
He had purchased, for this purpose, from Philip de Truy, the 
owner,^ a parcel of land, being a narrow strip lying between 
the road and the East River shore and containing more than 
five hundred feet of water frontage. At the southern end this 
parcel of ground contained but a few feet in width ; at its north- 
ern end, however, where it abutted upon the little haven al- 
ready spoken of, which, long ago filled up, forms the modern 
Peck Slip, it was of much greater width ; and here, after a little 
docking out and filling, Isaac Allerton built his warehouse, a 
capacious two-story building, the appearance of which has, 
without doubt, been preserved to us by the Labadist mis- 
sionaries. Danker and Sluyter, in their view of New 
York in 1679. The warehouse would appear to have very 
nearly occupied the sites of the present buildings, Nos. 8 
and 10 Peck Slip. 

Here, then, for a number of years the old Puritan mer- 
chant carried on his commercial transactions, making fre- 

1 See ante, page 237. 

2 The deed bears date, April 10, 1647. 



336 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

quent journeys backwards and forwards from his house at 
New Haven. Besides being at times quite largely interested 
in trade with the Netherlands and in dealings directly with 
the West India Company, a great part of the commerce be- 
tween New Netherland and the New England colonies passed 
through his hands. His warehouse here upon tlie East River 
became the resort of most of the English doing business in 
New Amsterdam ; and here, doubtless, many profound dis- 
cussions took place respecting the powers of the monarch and 
of the parliament; of " Divine Right," and of "The Good Old 
Cause ; " of the trial of King Charles and of the doings of 
Oliver Cromwell. " Allerton's Building " in fact was a prom- 
inent feature of the town ; and in the autumn of 1656, we find 
George Woolsey, who was still residing at the house, making 
a petition to the burgomasters for permission to retail wine 
and beer there, " as many strangers apply to him for lodgings." 
A license was refused at first, but was finally granted " for 
one year, as he has been at trouble, but not permanently, as 
being at too great a distance, and therefore suspect." 

The warehouse, too, was occasionally used in part at least 
for other purposes than those of commerce. In November, 

1654, it was hired by the burgomasters for the temporary re- 
ception of fifty boys and girls sent over from the almshouse 
at Amsterdam, — an experiment by the magistrates of that 
city. These children were to be bound out for the term of 
five years, after which period each was to receive fifty-three 
acres of land. Nor was Allerton's warehouse devoid of his- 
torical associations. When the Indians landed, in large 
numbers, upon Manhattan Island, on the 15th of September, 

1655, in the absence of Director-General Stuyvesant and of 
his soldiers, who had started a few days before upon their ex- 
pedition against the Swedes on the Delaware River, one of the 
first points at which they commenced their work of violence was 
at this warehouse. " They ran in large armed parties through 
the streets," says Van Tienhoven, in his report to the Coun- 
cil, " violently attacked the house of Mr. Allerton, knocking 
the lock from his door, beating his servants, and ransacking 



ATTACK ^'^N THE WAREHOUSE 337 

his premises, on pretence of searching for two Indians." 
There is indeed no telling to what lengths the Indians might 
have proceeded upon this occasion, for they were in number 
five or six hundred, and all of this portion of the town was in 
their power. They observed, however, that the gims of a 
Dutch ship commanded by C'aptain Scharborgh, wliich lay in 
the East River opposite Allerton's Warehouse, were being 
brought to bear upon the spot. A panic seized them, and 
they scurried away into the " Kreupelbosch " and behind the 
hill back of Thomas Hall's house, to get out of range of the 
guns in the vessel. It is quite probable that these depreda- 
tions by the natives led to the subsequent construction of 
palisades around Allerton's place, for in the " Duke's Plan " 
of 1661, the building appears to stand in an enclosure. 

As Isaac Allerton advanced in years, he seems to have 
\/ithdrawn more and more from active business at New Am- 
sterdam, his son Isaac Allerton, Junior, taking his place. 
This young man, who at the time of the building of his 
father's warehouse at New Amsterdam must have been a 
student ct the then newly established Harvard College, where 
he graduated in or about the year 1650, we find in occasional 
charge of his father's commercial interests as early as 1653. 
The elder Allerton, however, never lost interest in the foster- 
ing of trade and intercourse between New England and New 
Netherland, and upon more than one occasion he is found 
mediating, or even giving his own personal guarantee, for 
the sake of avoiding quarrels between his countrymen and the 
Dutch of New Amsterdam. He died at New Haven in the 
early part of the year 1659, and on the 16th of December of 
that year on the application of his son Isaac, we find the 
burgomasters of New Amsterdam appointing his old business 
associate Govert Loockermans, together with Captain Paulus 
Leendertsen van der Grift, George Woolsey, and John Law- 
rence, curators of his estate in New Amsterdam.^ Whether 

1 Isaac Allerton's yDungcst daughter, Mary, who married Elder Cushman, 
died at a great age, in 1G99, and is believed by some of the historians of Ply- 
mouth to have been the last survivor of the " Mayflower " colonists. 

22 



338 NEW AMSTERDAM AND i^TS PEOPLE 

the New England trade was still carried on at the warehouse 
after Isaac AUerton's decease, and if so, in whose hands it 
remained, are matters about which there is much obscurity. 
The building itself was standing many years after the death 
of its original owner, and towards the close of the seventeenth 
century it had come into the possession of the Beeckmans, 
who owned the property upon the opposite side of the road, 
or the modern Pearl Street. 

With the exception of the wooded swamp, of four or five 
acres in area, known as Bestevaers Kreupelbosch, which, as 
has been previously stated, was never made the subject of a 
grant by the Dutch government, all the land lying between 
Isaac AUerton's warehouse and the meadow called Wolphert 
Gerritsen's Vly (which with the small stream flowing through 
it known as the Versche Water, or sometimes as the Old Kill, 
formed the northern boundary of that portion of Manhattan 
Island pertaining more especially to the town of New Am- 
sterdam) composed originally a farm of about thirty-five acres, 
which, when it is first brought to our notice, about the year 
1640, had been partly cleared and cultivated by David Pro- 
voost. This tract extended back from the river to the Com- 
mon Pasture, now the City Hall Park, and its area, now densely 
crowded, in part with great ofBce, factory, and newspaper 
buildings, in part with squalid tenements of a river-side pop- 
ulation, may be said roughly to extend from the modern 
Ferry and Ann streets about to the present James Street. 
Near the river shore stood Provoost's humble farmhouse, at 
a point which is believed to be in the interior of the block 
between the modern Pearl and Water streets, Dover Street, and 
Peck Slip. East of the house and extending from the river 
shore up to the present Franklin Square, of which it covered 
the site as well as that of the modern Dover Street, was a 
small cherry and apple orchard, long afterwards famous as 
" the Cherry Garden," the trees of which may very likely have 
been set out by Provoost himself. Two centuries and a half 
after their planting they are still commemorated by the 



THE LOOCKERMANS FARM 339 

Cherry Street of the present day, — little suggestive of the 
fragrant white blossoms of the old seventeenth-century 
orchard. At David Provoost's farmhouse the road or track 
along the East River terminated, in his day ; whether the 
ferry to Long Island was established here during his occu- 
pancy we cannot tell, but after he had left the farm (which 
he had probably held as a tenant of the West India Com- 
pany), it was granted on the 26th of March, 1612, to two 
men, — to Govert Loockermans, the merchant, and to one 
Cornells Leendertsen, — who undoubtedly purchased the 
property with the direct intention of maintaining the ferry 
here. The description of the farm as given in the deed to 
these two purchasers presents such a curious picture of the 
condition at that early day of that portion of the modern city 
which has been designated above; that a translation of it, 
with some parentlietical explanations, may be not uninter- 
esting: it is described as "a dwelling house on the East 
River, together with the land thereto belonging, as the 
same is fenced in by David Provoost, which fencing 
begins at a brook of fresh water emptying itself into the 
East River " (the outlet of the Kolck Pond, the course of 
which ran irregularly along the present Roosevelt and James 
streets), "till to the land of Cornells van Tienhoven" 
(which lay south of the present Ann Street ; and Provoost's 
fence towards it skirted generally the modern Chatham and 
Nassau streets), " whose palisades, extending from the long 
highway" (present Broadway) "towards the East River" 
(along present Ann Street), " as may be seen by the marks by 
him made " (the fence of Van Tienhoven being evidently not 
as yet completed), " bordering on the aforesaid lands from the 
fence till to the great tree" (at the intersection of Ann and 
Gold streets), " which is the right division line between the 
land of Philip de Truy and Tienhoven ; the said Philip ex- 
tending his palisades from the said tree northeast by east and 
east northeast between both " (that is, midway between these 
two courses and along the present Gold Street), " till to Bes- 
tevaers Kreupelbosch " (the well-known modern " Swamp '' 



840 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

of Jacob Street and of the leather trade), " and from the 
East River northwest and north northwest" (along Ferry- 
Street), "till to the same swamp." The fact that "the 
Swamp " itself did not pass under this description evidently 
shows that at this time Provoost had fenced around it, prob- 
ably for the purpose of keeping his cattle out of its muddy 
depths. The rear portions of this farm, towards the present 
Chatham Street, were, it is also evident, only partly cleared of 
timber at the time of this grant. 

Of the actual establishment of the Long Island Ferry on 
Loockermans' and Leendertsen's farm but little is known, 
except that it was under the control of Cornells Dircksen 
(usually spoken of as the first ferryman), as earlj'- as the fall 
of 1642. That there should have been some earlier regular 
means of communication with the Long Island plantations, 
which were established several years prior to the last-men- 
tioned date, would seem altogether probable, but nothing in 
relation to the matter has come to us. Tlie location of the 
ferry was the outcome of natural conditions which prevailed ; 
the most feasible road to the river, upon the Long Island side, 
being down the ravine or depression which marked the course 
of the modern Fulton Street, and the landing-place upon 
Manhattan Island being directly opposite the termination of 
the Breucklyn road, and at nearly the narrowest part of the 
East River. As for Cornelis Dircksen, the ferryman, he 
possessed a farm upon the north side of the present Fulton 
Street, near the ferry, upon the Long Island side of the 
river, and this he was, doubtless, actively engaged in clearing 
and cultivating at this time, for although the ferry and its 
appurtenances were under his control, as already stated, he 
does not appear to have been occupied, during much of the 
time, in its actual management, for as early as 1643 he had 
leased it to Captain Willem Tomassen. A house and landing- 
place being also required for ferry purposes on the New 
Amsterdam side of the river, it is quite evident that Loocker- 
mans' house and the land in its vicinity was hired for those 
purposes, but whether the building was used exclusively by 



THE LONG ISLAND FERRY 341 

the ferryman and his employees, or whether it was partly 
used for purposes of the farm, is not ascertained. At some 
time prior to the year 1646, Loockermans' associate, 
Cornells Leendertsen, died, and Dirck Cornelissen, who seems 
to have been his son, had taken his place; other "partners" 
in the Netherlands are spoken of in some papers executed by 
Loockermans and Dirck Cornelissen about this time, but this 
may refer merely to others of Cornells Leendertsen's heirs. 
It was at this period that Govert Loockermans and Dirck 
Cornelissen, after reserving the farmhouse and a parcel of 
ground of irregular sliape, lying to the east of it and embrac- 
ing three acres or more of land, disposed of the rest of the 
farm in the following manner: The land lying between the 
farmhouse and Allerton's warehouse (then probably just in 
course of erection), was sold to one William Goulder. This 
parcel, which covered nearly two acres of ground, ran " from 
the height next the Strand " back to Bestevaers Kreupelbosch ; 
and its easterly line seems to have about crossed the site of 
the present Harper building, near Franklin Square ; along its 
foot on the " Strand " (no longer following the present Pearl 
Street), ran the road to Loockermans' farmhouse, and to the 
ferry. 

Another parcel of ground sold by Loockermans and 
Cornelissen at this time was at the fartliest extremity of 
their land along the East River, where there was a long, nar- 
row strip of upland lying between the river shore and the 
meadow, called Wolpherts Vly ; around its terminal point, the 
brook known as the " Old Kill " emptied into the East River, 
not far from the line of the modern James Street. This point 
of land, not more than one hundred and seventy feet in width 
at its widest part, and gradually diminishing throughout its 
length of about three hundred and sixty feet, ahnost to a 
mere point at its northeasterly termination, was sold to an 
Encfhshman named Georore Cleer. At the same time also, 
the balance of the Loockermans' farm was leased for ten years 
to Hendrick Pietersen van Hasselt, a farmer who had been 
one of the first tenants of the West India Company's bouwery 



342 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

lying west of the common pasture, or modern City Hall Park. 
This man occupied a small house of his own on the Heerewegh, 
or Broadway, just outside of the " Land Poort," or gate at 
Wall Street, and was a well-known character of the town, 
who bore the whimsical appellation of Kint in't Water, or 
''Child-in-the-Water." 

If Loockermans and Cornelissen had any expectations that 
the neighborhood of their East River farm was to be improved 
by the grants they made to William Goulder and to George 
Cleer, in 1646, they were doomed to disappointment. Neither 
of these men seems to have made any attempt to build upon 
the lands purchased by them. There are traces of Goulder's 
occupation of his parcel as late as 1649, after which no 
further reference to him is met with.^ George Cleer was living 
as late as 1660, when he took part in forming tlie first settle- 
ment of the town of Rye, in Westchester County ; whether 
his design in purchasing this remote corner of land on the 
Loockermans' farm was to establish potteries or a mill there, 
as was afterwards done by others, we can only conjecture. 
At all events, both his parcel of ground and that of Goulder 
are soon found to have returned into Loockermans' possession, 
very probably by virtue of mortgages which he held upon 
them. 

Through his marriage with the widow of Dirck Cornelissen, 
in 1649, Govert Loockermans had come into complete pos- 
session of the East River farm. In 1653 he sold the farm- 
house, with its garden, orchard, etc., to the then newly appointed 
ferry-master, Eghbert van Borsum, who was the owner of the 
premises at the time of our survey. This man, who was the 
son of Jan van Borsum, of Erabden, in East Friesland, an 
ancient town under German rule but with many Dutch char- 
acteristics, had come to New Netherland at a comparatively 
early date, where, in 1639, he married Annetje Hendrickse, 
of Amsterdam. He seems to have been engaged in the 
coasting trade, and in 1647 was master of the " yacht " 

1 He may have been the person called William Goulding, whom we find in 
1661 at Gravesend, L. I, 



VAN BORSUM, THE FERRYMAN 343 

Prins Willem. He was, moreover, on good terms with Direc- 
tor-General Stuyvesant, and in 1649 reported to that official 
certain hard things which the latter's enemy, Cornells Melyn, 
had said about him at New Haven, with whicli Van Borsum 
claimed to have been greatly shocked.^ Perhaps it was in 
return for these good offices that in the fall of 1652 Eghbert 
received the appointment of ferry-master to Long Island ; and 
in the old farmhouse he kept a tavern, where many a thirsty 
passenger has refreshed himself before or after braving tlie 
perils of a journey across the East River in one of Eghbert's 
scows. Although the office of ferryman was no sinecure, — 
since by the reguhitions of 1654 he had to hold himself in 
readiness to transport across the river any passengers that 
might offer themselves between the hours of five o'clock in 
the morning and eight in the evening in summer, and from 
seven till five in the winter ,2 — yet Eghbert seems to have 
found it a lucrative one, and at about the time of our survey, 
or towards the close of the year 1655, he was actively engaged 
in building a new house for himself on the Breucklyn side. 
The old house and the ferry seem to have remained in 
Van Borsum's hands for several years longer, but by 
1670 they had returned into the possession of G overt 
Loockermans. 

At the period of our survey, the ferry-house was no longer 
the outpost in this direction, of New Amsterdam. In 1653, at 
about the time of the sale to Eghbert van Borsum, Loocker- 
mans had sold another parcel of land, lying to tlie eastward of 
Van Borsum's garden and orchard, to Henry Brazier, fre- 
quently spoken of by the Dutch as Herry Breser. Brazier 
was an Englishman from the shire of Essex, and is found in 
New Amsterdam as early as 1644, in which year he married 
Susanna, the widow of "William Watkyns. He appears to 
have been a tobacco-planter, and had a tract of about thirty- 
two acres of land upon Long Island, somewhat north of 

1 See ante, page 115. 

2 The curious reservation was made, " not during tempests, or when the mill 
has given way." 



344 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

the ferry,^ and nearly opposite the land which he acquired of 
Loockermans. This plot, purchased from Loockermans, seems 
to have extended along the river from the ferryman's garden 
a distance of about two hundred and ninety English feet, to a 
point about seventy or eighty feet west of the present Roosevelt 
Street. From the shore it ran back from two hundred to two 
hundred and fifty feet to a line a short distance north of the 
present Cherry Street. The continuation of the ferryman's 
road still ran along the beach to give access to Brazier's place, 
and there is evidence that his house stood close to the shore 
at a spot a few feet east of the present Dover Street, and south 
of Cherry Street. Brazier had hardly established himself at 
this place when, in the summer of 1G54, the Dutch in New 
Amsterdam were thrown into a great state of excitement by 
the intelligence that an English fleet sent by Cromwell had 
arrived in New England in the war then being carried on 
between England and the Netherlands, and that preparations 
were being made there for an attack on New Amsterdam. 
Henry Brazier, suspected by his Dutch neighbors, may have 
found his position an irksome one, or he may have considered 
the Dutch chances for successful resistance as hopeless, and 
may therefore have started off to acquire the merit of a timely 
submission to the anticipated new regime. At any rate he 
quitted New Amsterdam, — in all probability with his family, — 
although in doing so at such a time he violated one of Direc- 
tor-General Stuy vesant's ordinances. As peace, however, was 
soon afterwards declared between England and the Nether- 
lands, Brazier found himself somewhat amiss in his calcula- 
tions. He returned to New Amsterdam in 1655, much crest- 
fallen, but Stu}^^esant and the Council received him in high 
dudgeon, and made an order on the 5th of May of that year, 
that " Harry Bresar, who left in the time of the troubles, 
despite the notices, is to be allowed to return to settle his 
affairs, but not to become domiciliated." It took Brazier so 

1 Oddly enough, Mr. D. T. Valentine, and a host of those who have followed 
him, have transferred this land to the other side of tlie river, " in the vicinity of 
the present Franklin Square." 



DIRCK THE POT-BAKER 345 

long to settle his affairs, however, that ten years afterwards 
he is found quietly residing here with his wife and family of 
four young daughters. The wrath of the Dutch was, as a 
rule, not of long duration, and Brazier probably had little 
difficulty in making his peace with them. 

In 1653, Govert Loockermans disposed of the remaining 
parcel of the shore front of his farm along the East River 
(being the same parcel which in 1641 he had conveyed to 
George Cleer) to another Englishman, a Londoner named 
Thomas Stevenson. Stevenson about this time had recently 
been engaged in farming some land across the East River, 
and may have desired, as did many of the other Long Island 
farmers, to acquire a place of residence in New Amsterdam 
within the protection of the fort and garrison, and yet as near 
as possible to their farming lands. He built at once upon 
this point of land, but in the next year he left to take part in 
the newly established settlement of Middelburgh, the later 
Newtown on Long Island, selling his property upon the point, 
which then seems to have contained two buildings, probably 
of a rather humble description, to Willem Pietersen de Groot, 
a Dutchman from Haerlem, and to Jan Peeck, the latter of 
whom does not appear further in connection with the prop- 
erty. Willem Pietersen, however, soon leased the premises 
to a man who spent many years of his life there, and who 
purchased the place in 1657, a short time after the period of 
our survey. This was Dirck Claessen, from Leeuwerden, the 
capital city of the province of Friesland, in the Netherlands. 
He was more commonly known as Dirck de Pottebaker, or 
" the potter," and it seems quite probable that he carried on 
his potteries at this place, his house being near the shore, and 
very near the present Roosevelt Street. Life was not all 
eau-de-cologne and rose leaves at that spot, any more in the 
seventeenth century than it is at the present day. The neigh- 
bors were not at all harmonious. Mrs. Brazier's patience 
was sorely tried by the pot-baker's hogs which frequently 
ravaged her garden, insomuch that she represents to the 
burgomasters that she " suffers great damage, and has to have 



346 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 

one of her children constantly in attendance." Nevertheless, 
the Braziers bore no malice, and when, not long afterwards, 
Dirck had had a serious falling out with his wife, a widow 
whom he had espoused a short time before, we find the deacons 
of the Dutch Church informing the magistrates that " Dirck 
Claessen, Pottebacker, has driven away his wife, and that the 
aforesaid woman suffers great want, and lies on straw without 
bed or bedding, at Mr. Herry Bresar's house at the ferry, 
by the fresh water, and has the ague, and that her husband 
will not allow sufficient for her support." 

The road or track along the East River shore, less and less 
travelled as it extended beyond the ferry, till finally trodden 
mainly by Dirck Claessen and his hogs, terminated at that 
worthy's dwelling. Two or three years after the time of our 
survey, or in 1658, Abraham Pietersen, the miller, had thrown 
a dam across the little brook of the " Fresh Water," and near 
the present James and Cherry streets had built a tide-mill, 
which he used for a few years, till the neighboring residents 
made complaint of his dam throwing back salt water into the 
Kolck pond. In 1655, however, Dirck Claessen's house upon 
the Point was the Ultima Thule of New Amsterdam. Behind 
it lay the lonely salt meadow of Wolfpherts Vly, and before 
it stretched the lonely expanse of the East River. The wild 
ducks swam along the shore without much fear of molestation ; 
gulls skimmed along the surface of the water ; the fish-hawk 
sailed in graceful circles high above it, or shot down into it 
after his prey, like an arrow from a bow ; and crows stalked 
along in search of dainties over the shingly beach, which 
stretched away towards the northeast, at the foot of the low 
bluffs, till at the distance of a mile or more it curved to the 
left and disappeared around the tumbled boulders of Corlaers 
Hoek. 



APPENDIX I 

THE JUSTUS DANCKERS VIEW OF NEW AMSTERDAM 

AFTER the completion of the text of the present work, there 
came into the possession of the author a view of New Am- 
sterdam of more than ordinar}' interest. It is an old litho- 
graph, eight by eleven and one-half inches in size, and purports to 
be copied from an ancient etching of the same size, published by 
Justus Danckers at Amsterdam. Like the "• Hartgers View," 
alluded to in a previous note, the authenticity of this view is 
vouched for by the fact that it is a reverse. The date given to the 
print is "about the year 1640," but as a matter of fact it repre- 
sents a period about ten years later than that date. It Avas pub- 
lished by Henry R. Robinson of New York, at some date appar- 
ently between the years 1836 and 1842. 

Upon reversing this view, it is found to correspond quite closely 
in its general appearance with the well-known " Vanderdonck 
View," but upon a minute examination, the points of dissimilarity 
are found to be numerous. These lead to the conclusion that the 
view is either the original camera obscura sketch (supposed to have 
been taken by Augustyn Heermaus) from which the " Vander- 
donck View " was prepared, and that the differences are caused by 
carelessness in the reversing and copying of that sketch ; or else 
that the Danckers view is a different and independent one taken 
from about the same point, — upon the northwesterly part of Gov- 
ernor's Island, — and at somewhere about the same period. 

Several of the topographical features of the town are brought 
out with much greater distinctness upon this Danckers view than 
on the "Vanderdonck View." Some of these are as follows: 

1. The old storehouse of the West India Company, which occu- 
pied a part of the present Whitehall Street, is shown with great 
distinctness, occupying, in fact, almost the central point of the 



348 APPENDIX I 

picture. Whitehall Street itself is shown to have occupied a 
shallow depression or ravine running down to the East River. 

2. The course of the modern Broad Street, with Cornelis 
Melyn's house and outbuildings occupying a portion of it, is 
clearly shown. 

3. The ravine of " Burger's Path," leading down to the river 
side, can be distinguished without difficulty. 

4. A curious structure with a conical or pyramidal roof, which, 
from the perspective of the " Vanderdouck View," appears to be 
a hay barrack at a great distance, and has always been a puzzling 
feature in that view, is shown in the Danckers etching as just 
peeping over a small rise of ground back of the " Great Tavern," 
and is at once determined beyond any reasonable doubt to be the 
low belfry tower attached to the old Bark Mill, in which the first 
church services were held, and of which previous mention has 
already been made in the text of this work. 

5. The e'Xtreme right and left of the Danckers etching remain 
in an unfinished condition, just as the artist probably left it upon 
terminating his camera sketch. The shore of the East River, in- 
stead of turning around the fort in the direction of the Hudson, 
is continued indefinitely in a straight line. At the left-hand 
corner of the etching (being at the right of the true view), is what 
appears to be an almost mountainous elevation of land, which of 
course could never have occupied that spot. This was e^^dently 
a misconception of the artist's rough lines of the foliage of the 
thick clump of trees which is well known to have occupied the site of 
the present Hanover Square and its vicinity, upon the river bank. 

Some difficulties in respect to the buildings in the Danckers 
View are encountered. The old church building upon the water 
side is by no means shown as clearly as it is in the Vanderdonck 
View ; on the contrary, the houses seem at this point to be thrown 
forwards towards the river shore into a position which they could 
not have actually occupied. This leads to the conclusion that the 
Danckers View was a panoramic one, i. e., the point of view was 
changed, in order to make the houses in the vicinity of the " Great 
Tavern" show in better perspective. It appears to have been 
just at the site of the old church where the two views have been 
joined together, and the joining of the views has been so unskil- 
fully performed that the church has been distorted or entirely 
concealed. 



APPENDIX I 349 

A curious feature of the Danckers etchiug is that it contains 
the silly addition of the sprawling human figure suspended by the 
waist from the crane upon the river side, as also another figure 
dangling from the adjacent gallows. Instances of capital punish- 
ment actually carried into effect at New Amsterdam are very rare, 
— so far, at any rate, as the records show, — and are mostly 
confined to cases arising in the garrison of the fort, or in the naval 
service, and the body of a criminal swinging from the gallows 
could never have been an ordinary sight. If Heermans was 
indeed the artist of this view, it is very probable that the addi- 
tion of the figures was made by way of lampoon upon Director- 
General Stuyvesant's administration, Heermans being at this time 
in high enmity with the Director and with the Secretary Van Tien- 
hoven. Upon the published view of Vanderdonck, the figures 
did not appear; but in the much later nondescript sketch, of little 
worth, sometimes called the " Montanus View," they do appear, the 
gallows being garnished in that view with no less than three 
imaginary culprits. 



APPENDIX II 

THE DESCP^NDANTS OF CORNELIS MELYN 

IT may be not without interest to prosecute a few inquiries as 
to the descendants of Cornelis Melyn, whose career at New 
Amsterdam has been dwelt upon at some length in the text 
of this work (pages 94 to 125), and whom the author is inclined 
more and more to regard as the central figure of bis day in New 
Netherland. 

When Cornelis Melyn brought his family to New Amsterdam 
about the year 1641, it consisted of his wife Jannetje and three 
children, so far as we can learn. Of these his daughter Cornelia 
was at this time about thirteen years of age, and she seems to 
have been the eldest of the children. A son whose name is not 
furnished to us is said to have been drowned in the wreck of the 
"Princess" in 1647, when as a lad he was accompanying his 
father to the Nethei'lands, and the third of Melyn's children 
appears to have been his son Jacob, who reached years of 
maturity. 

After the Melyns reached New Amsterdam, three of their chil- 
dren were baptized in the Dutch Church there; namely, Susanna, 
on the 14th of June, 1643; Magdaleen, on the 3d of March, 1645; 
and Isaac, on the 22d of July, 1646. Of the first two of these 
we have no further information, and they may have died young; 
but Isaac grew up, and was long a resident of New York. It 
has been shown in that portion of this work which is above 
alluded to, that, persecuted and harassed by Director Stuyve- 
sant for the part he had taken in the afl'airs of New Netherland, 
Cornelis Melyn retired with his sou Jacob, in 1657, to the New 
Haven Colony, and that there, together with his son, he took the 
oath of allegiance to the English government. Although he oc- 
casionally visited New Amsterdam during the next five or six 
years, he appears to have maintained his residence at New 



APPENDIX II 351 

Haven, but of the details of his life there we are ignorant; they 
would undoubtedly be interesting, if known, and might indeed 
form an important chapter in the history of the English conquest 
of New York in 1664, for Cornelis Melyn was a man who was 
most tenacious and unflinching in his purposes, and there is not 
the least reason to suppose that he had forgotten Stuyvesant's 
treatment of himself. Certain it is that from some reason he 
was jealously watched to the last, both by Stuyvesant and by the 
officers of the West India Company in the Netherlands. If, how- 
ever, he had on foot any machinations against the rule of the 
West India Company, we have no reason to believe that he lived 
to see them carried out, for no allusions to him can be found 
later than about the beginning of the year 1663. 

In the mean time Melyn's oldest daughter Cornelia and her 
young brother Isaac remained in New Amsterdam, as did also 
(for a large portion of the time, at any rate) Melyn's wife 
Jannetje. Cornelia Melyn, as already stated, had married, in 
1647, Captain Jacobus Loper, and he, after a short married 
life, having died, leaving her a widow with two children. Jacobus 
and Jannetje, she married, on the 7th of April, 1653, Jacobus 
Schellinger of Amsterdam. 

The Schelliugers of Amsterdam were at this time a well-to-do 
family, who seem to have been quite largely engaged in mercan- 
tile affairs. Some of them were noticeably men of thrift, and 
the author's attention has been called to the "Kohier," or Assess- 
ment list of Amsterdam for the year 1631, upon which such a 
man as Kiliaen van Rensselaer appears assessed for 50,000 florins 
only; while Ilillebrant Schellinger, "out schepen," is assessed at 
70,000; Cornelis Gerritsz Schellinger for 70,000, and Cornelis 
Schellinger the elder at 36,000 florins. 

Jacobus Schellinger was likewise engaged in mercantile business 
at New Amsterdam, where he is said to have come in the interest 
of an uncle at Amsterdam, whose name, as would appear from 
allusions in some of the records, was Pieter Toom. Schellinger 
seems to have resided in New Amsterdam for a period of some 
twelve or thirteen years after his marriage to Cornelia Melyn or 
Loper, in 1653. During that period he had four children bap- 
tized in the Dutch Church; namely, Willem, on March 8, 1654; 
Catalyntje or Catherine, on April 19, 1656; Abraham, on Sept. 
20, 1662; and Daniel, on July 19, 1665. The name of Jacobus 



352 APPENDIX II 

Schellinger does not, it is true, appear in the assessment list of 
the town in April, 1665, but that of Cornells Melyn does, though 
there is much reason to believe that he was not living at this 
time; and there seems to be but little doubt that it is the Melyn 
property which is referred to in the list, and that this property 
was in the occupation of the Melyn family, including Jacobus 
Schellinger and his wife and children. 

Of the immediate descendants of Cornells Melyn we have seen 
(page 125 of this work) that his youngest son Isaac had died 
prior to 1722, leaving only one child by his wife Temperance, 
daughter of William Loveridge of Albany; namely, Joanna, wife 
of Jonathan Dickinson. Jacob Melyn, the oldest son, married 
and had several children baptized in the Dutch Church; namely, 
Susanna and Jacob, on Oct. 3, 1674; and Daniel, Samuel, and 
Abigail on Aug. 7, 1677. This baptizing of his children in 
groups, so to speak, would seem to indicate that Jacob and his 
family were sojourning at times away from New York. He 
removed to Boston in his latter years, as previously stated, 
and no information has been obtained as to whether his name 
or lineage still continues. 

Of Cornells Melyn's daughter Cornelia, however, the descend- 
ants are still living in considerable number. She, with her hus- 
band, Jacobus Schellinger, and with her children, remained, as it 
would seem, in New York until 1666 or 1667, when they removed 
to the English settlement of Easthampton upon the eastern ex- 
tremity of Long Island. 

The causes which led a distinctively Dutch family to quit their 
associations of many years and the society of their countrymen, 
for the purpose of taking up their residence in a purely English 
community, and the reasons why these new-comers were unhesi- 
tatingly accepted among a people proud of their English birth or 
descent, not particularly desirous of additions to their organiza- 
tion, and abundantly disposed to scrutinize rigidly all new appli- 
cations for membership, on account of the questions of the 
rights in commonage which were involved, would undoubtedly 
be, if fully known, an interesting episode in the history of the 
colonization of the New York towns. That the full details of 
this affair would throw light upon the mutual relations, now little 
understood, of Cornells Melyn, Govert Loockermans, Isaac Aller- 
ton, and perhaps Jacob Steendam, with each other and with the 



APPENDIX II 35S 

New Haven and Connecticut colonies, there cannot be much 
question. The Easthampton settlement was a distinct depend- 
ency of the mainland colonies, Governors Eaton of New Haven 
and Hopkins of Connecticut having made the original Indian 
purchase in 1648, as trustees for the settlers. The trading as 
well as the political relations were close between the new settle- 
ment and New Haven, and it was doubtless through New Haven 
that the attention of the Melyn family was directed to East- 
hampton; the immediate cause of their breaking up the 
domestic arrangements which had so long prevailed is quite 
likely to have been the fact that the two sons of Cornells Melyn 
had now grown up to manhood and were perhaps desirous of 
establishing themselves upon their small patrimony in New 
York. 

Whatever the causes may have been, we find Jacobus Schel- 
linger in October, 1667, purchasing from one Benjamin Conkling 
the rights or a part of them which had previously pertained to an 
earlier colonist, Andrew Miller, whose "home lot" (now acquired 
by Schellinger) was a capacious plot of about twenty acres situ- 
ated upon the north side of the main street of Easthampton, about 
in the middle of the present village. 

As the family of Jacobus Schellinger, on their journey down 
to Easthampton, emerged from the two or three miles of wood- 
land road which lay between their new home and the sloop which 
had brought them to the " Three-Mile Harbor," — the port of East- 
hampton in Gardiner's Bay, — they could see before them the 
fields of the new settlement, stretching in long strips, as at the 
present day, towards the dark oak woods which surrounded them, 
and could doubtless hear, as one may hear now, the quail piping to 
one another in the solitary back lots. Sixteen or seventeen years 
of cultivation had checkered the plain with alternating patches 
of wheat and rye, of maize and tobacco, and near the houses 
here and there a young orchard was growing up, or upon spots of 
greensward, the flax lay rotting in long brownish rows. Along 
the capacious village street, lined by a couple of score of low 
thatched cottages (some probably still of their original log con- 
struction), no rows of great elms stretched as at present, but the 
grass grew thickly in its broad space where perhaps the cattle, 
just returned from the Common Pasture, gathered at their owners' 
bars and gates, or at the farther end of the street crowded to 

23 



354 APPENDIX 11 

drink at the Town Pond. Upon the grassy bank (designed for a 
burial-ground) beyond the pond stood the little thatched church, 
and still farther in the distance, beyond the green slopes of the 
"Calf Pasture," the white sand dunes shut out the ocean. 

Here Jacobus Schellinger and his family soon merged into the 
English community about them; in the course of the next genera- 
tion nothing but the name remained to show an origin different 
from that of the Mulfords and Hedges, the Strattons and Hands 
surrounding them, and we find one of the grandsons of Cornelia 
Melyn, bearing the singular name of Lion Loper, in honor of 
Lion Gardiner, the great man of the settlement and proprietor 
of Gardiner's Island, into whose family some of the descendants 
of Cornelia Melyn appear to have married at an early date. 
Jacobus Schellinger was one of the most well-to-do men of the 
community, and is early assessed at the second highest figure 
in the town. With him and his immediate family had come his 
stepson. Jacobus or James Loper, then a young man just grown 
up, who soon acquired the grant of a new parcel of land a short 
distance east of his stepfather's home, on the north side of the 
road to the Three-Mile Harbor. Both Loper and his stepfather 
turned their attention "at an early date to the whalefishing in- 
dustry, then profitable at the eastern end of Long Island, and 
they were engaged in it for a number of years. They employed 
largely for their whaling crews the neighboring Montauk Indians, 
who were expert in this craft; and there is an agreement still 
extant by Schellinger and Loper with thirteen of the Indians, 
bearing date July 4, 1675, in which the former agree to fuimish 
the necessary boats, and to cart the products of the fishery a 
distance not exceeding two miles for the purpose of trying or 
boiling; the Indians to receive one half of the profits. The 
Schellingers indeed appear to have been somewhat prone to 
dealings with the Indians, and a curious indenture of apprentice- 
ship still exists, important as showing at what an early date 
domestic relations were established between the Easthampton 
settlers and the Montauk Indians. In this document a certain 
"Muntauket Indian commonly named Papasequin" and his wife 
agree with Jacobus Schellinger and his son Jacob to bind out 
to the latter "our sonn named Quausuch, ould now above seaven 
yeares;" the time of apprenticeship was to run from "primo 
Aprill at ye yeare eightie eight," and was to extend to April 1, 



APPENDIX II 355 

1698, at which time, besides certain payments to the father, in 
case of good behavior, etc., of the lad, the latter was to receive 
the sum of ten pounds in money or goods. 

The Schelliugers at Easthampton were not altogether cut off 
from their former life, for here Cornelia Schelliuger's brother 
Isaac occasionally brought in his vessel to the Harbor with 
freight from New York. One of his receipts for freight for the 
return voyage is still extant. It is dated "one board the barke, 
25 May, 1680," and shows that he took with him "tobacco pips," 
from the fields of Easthampton, linen and woollen from its 
domestic manufactures, whalebone and oil from the fisheries, and 
the unsold remainder apparently of a mercantile shipment, from 
William Darvall, a well-known merchant of New York, embrac- 
ing ironware, "Sarge and Cersey," and gunpowder. 

Jacobus Schellinger resided at Easthampton for more than a 
quarter of a century, and there two of his children, Cornells and 
Jacob, were born. He died on the 17th of June, 1693, aged 
sixty-seven years, but his wife Cornelia outlived him nearly 
another quarter of a century, dying on Feb. 25, 1717, aged 
eighty-eight years. Both are supposed to have been buried in 
the old churchyard of Easthampton. It was a few years before 
the death of his father that Jacobus Schelliuger's son Abraham, 
then a man of mature years, had his attention directed to the 
fertile lands lying two or three miles east of the village of East- 
hampton, at what was called by the Indians Amagansett. Here 
he procured a large grant in 1690, and here he and his youngest 
brother Jacob are supposed to have been the pioneers of the 
village of Amagansett, the most easterly hamlet upon Long 
Island; his name is believed to be still commemorated in 
"Abram's Landing," a small haven upon Gardiuer's Bay about 
a mile east of Amagansett, and in "Abram's Path," a narrow 
wood road in the same vicinity. 

After the death of Jacobus Schellinger, the homestead at East- 
hampton appears to have remained in the possession of his oldest 
son Willem, but in the course of time to have passed to a branch 
of the Gardiner family. As for Abraham Schellinger, the pioneer 
of Amagansett, he seems to have died in the early part of the 
year 1713 (k. s.). His will, which is to be found in the Surro- 
gate's Office of New York, disposes of his land at "Amugonst" 
to his oldest son William; while to his son Abraham he devises 



356 APPENDIX II ' 

a half-interest which he held in Plumb Island, between Long 
Island and the Connecticut shore; and to another son, Isaac, he 
gives an interest in three tracts of land in the county of West- 
chester, New York. Besides these three sons, Abraham Schel- 
linger also left a young son, Zachariah, and three daughters. 

Like that of her mother, Januetje Melyn, Cornelia Schellinger's 
life was long and eventful; her memories must have embraced 
Antwerp in its decaying splendor, and New Amsterdam with no 
splendor at all, — merely a few thatched cottages around the fort. 
She remembered Staten Island as an unbroken wilderness, and 
her father's plantation there, twice destroyed by Indians, and the 
days of panic and distress in the little house on the Graft in New 
Amsterdam. Then came the long struggles of her father against 
colonial maladministration and his self-imposed exile from New 
Amsterdam, during many years of which the care of his family 
had devolved largely upon herself. She had seen the village of 
huts at New Amsterdam grow into a town of importance, and 
had seen the English rule supplant that of the Dutch. Of her 
father's two great enemies so well known to her, she could re- 
member how the life of one had closed in horror in the wreck of 
the "Princess" (when her own brother and her pastor also per- 
ished) ; and how the other had ended his days in seclusion and 
in bitter humiliation at his farmhouse up the Bouwery Lane 
on Manhattan Island. In her latter years she found half a 
century of quiet life filled with domestic duties, but besides her 
son Abraham she was also fated to see her youngest son Jacob 
grow up to adult manhood, and die before her in the year 1714. 
He, as it appears, had married into the English family of Baker 
at Easthamptou, and left a family of eight children surviving 
him. Through the various branches which have been enumer- 
ated, the descendants of Cornelia Melyn are still to be found in 
large numbers in the vicinity of Easthampton, as previously 
stated, but it is not within the design of this note to pursue 
the later genealogy. 



INDEX 



Abrahamsen, Jacob, 316. 

Achter Col, destroj^ed by the Indians, 
178. 

Adriaensen, IMaryn, at the " Shrove Tide 
Dinner," 103; purchases land on East 
Kiver, 280; early life. 291; association 
with Jan Daraen, 202; heads petition 
of 1613 to attack the Indians, 21)3; his 
assault on Director Kieft, 294; sent to 
the Netherlands, 295. 

Adriaensen, Willem, 280, 281, 285. 

" Adventure," the, gallev, 255 et seq. 

Aertsen, Govert, 236, 240, 2(38. 

Allaerdt view of New Amsterdam, 244, 
note. 

Allerton, Isaac, 42, 196; association with 
Govert Looclcermans, 237 ; his warehouse, 
331; early life, 3-32; at the Plymonth 
Colony, 333; at New Haven, 334; busi- 
ness relations at New Amsterdam, 335; 
establishes trading house, 335; " Allev- 
ton's Building," 336 ; attack on his ware- 
house by the Indians, 336. See Ap- 
pendix II. 

Allerton, Isaac, junior, 334, 337. 

Amagansett, Long Island, descendants of 
Cornells Melyn at. See Appendix II. 

Ambrosius, Moses, 80, note. 

Andriessen, Pieter, 164; establishment on 
Long Island, 165; captured by Indians, 
166 ef seq., 170. 

Ann Street, 311. See Van Ticnhoven's 
Lane, 339. 

Anthony, Allard. 47, 54, 60, 8S. 285. 

Antwerp in tlie 17th century, 95 et seq. 

Arnheni, projected village of, 219. 

Atwater, Joshua, 231. 

Augustinus, Jan, 285, note. 



Bakeu. .Tohn, Capt., affray with William 
Faterson, 199 et seq. ; 2QZ, note. 

Bajitist Church, first in New York, 318. 

Barentsen, Simon, 126, note. 

Bark Mill, the, 155, Appendix I. 

Barn of West India Co., 182. 

Bartre, William, 270, note. 

Bastions of the Palisades, 273, 274. 

Baxter, George, 32, note; 179, 180, 237. 

Baxter, Thomas, property confiscated, 19. 
See 32, note ; captures a Dutch vessel, 42. 

Bavard, Anna, 286. 

Bayard, Balthazar, 244. 



Bayard, Nicholas, 174, 203, note, 246. 

Beaver Path, the, 33, note. 

Beaver Street. See Prinsen Straet. 

Bedlo, Isaac, 49, 197, 198. 

Beeckman, Willem, bouwery at Ilarlcm, 
72; 306, 328. See also Beekman. 

Beekman, Jochem, 150. 

Beekmau's Orchard, 328. See Beecknuui. 

Beekman Street, 328. 

Bellamont, E.irl of. Governor of New York, 
253. 254, 2.59. 

Bergen, Jacob Hansen, 301, note. 

Bescher, Thomas. See Belts. 

Bestevaers Kreupelbosch. See "Swamp, 
The." 

Betts, Thomas, 76. 

Bickley, William, 124. 

"Black John," 11. 

Blanck, Juriaen, 194. 

Blauveldt, Captain, of the privateer "La 
Garce," 69 et seq. 

Bleecker, Jan Jansen, 173, note. 

Blevck, Ariaentje, 49. 

Blockhouse, the, 2, 151, 152. 

Blommaert, Adriaen, Capt., 128. 

Blommaerts Vly, 9, 66, 81, 104, 152. 

Bogardus, Everardus, Dominie, his house 
on W^inckel Straet, 14 et seq.; marries 
Annetje Janse, 16; his bouwery, 16; 
attacks Director Kieft's Indian policy', 
24; suit for slander by Oloff van Cort- 
landt, 26; drowned in wreck of the 
"Princess," 29, 59; comment on Kieft's 
pamjihlet of vindication, 106. Sec 158, 
his partv at the City Tavern, 180. See 
294, 299". 

Bohemia, manor of, 281, 289, 290. 

Boon, Francis, 193. 

Bout, Jan Evertsen, 233. 

Bradford, William, his house, 233, note. 

Bradlev, Ilenrv, 249. 

Bradley, Samuel, 249, 251. 

Bradley, Sarah, mairies William Cox, 249; 
marries John Oort, 250; marries Capt. 
Wm. Kidd, 251 ; marries Christopher 
Rousby, her will, etc., 266. 

Bradley, Thomas, ('apt., 249. 

Brazier, Henry, 326; house on the East 
Kiver, 343; ordered to quit New Amster- 
dam, 344; troubles witli Dirck Claessen, 
345. 

Bresar. .See Brazier. 

Brewery of the West India Co., 34, 178 ; 



358 



INDEX 



of Jacob van Couwenhoven, 147, et se.q., 

161; of Jan Damen, 298: of Jan Vinje, 

300. 
Bridge, at Broad Street, 5, 88, 94, 152. 
Bridge I>ane. See Brugh Steegh. 
Bridge Street. See Brugh Straet. 
Bridges, Charles, 185, Ui et seq., 218. 
Broad Street. *S'ee Bloramaerts Vh', The 

Ditch, and Heere Graft. 
Broad Street, gate at, 274. 
Broen, Tonias, 27(j, note. 
Bronck, Jonas, 108, 1G4, 193. 
Brouwer, Adam, 24. 
Brouwer Straet, 6, 7, note, 69. 
Brown, William, 69. 
Bruce, John and Lysbet, 318, note. 
Brugh Steegh, 33 /closed, 34. 
Brugh Straet, 6. 

Brutell, Peter and Margaretha, 318, note. 
Bruynsen, Hage, 321. 
Buccaneers, the, 210. 
Burger, Engeltje. See Mans, Engeltje. 
Burger, Hermanns. 234. 
Burger, Johannes, 234. 
Burger's Mill, Sluice, and Kill, 232. 
Burger's Path, 222, 224, 243. See Appen- 

di.K I. 
Bushwick Creek and Bushwick, 323. 



Cabins, earl}', at New Amsterdam, 2. 
Calder, Jochem, 163. 
Canapaukah Creek, 168, 228, 231. 
Cai)ske, Tlie. See Schreyers Hoek. 
Carpenel, Jan Jacobsen, 164. 
Carstensen, Claes, 161, 162; Indian inter- 
preter. 162. note. 
Catiemuts Hoek, 4, 330. 
Cattle Pens, the, 275. 
Cedar, the privateer, 214. 
Central Park, New York, 72. 
Chatham Square. 331. 
Cherry Garden, the, 338. 
CherrV Street, 339. 

Church, Dutch, of 1626 in Barkmill, 155 et 
seq.: of 1633, 16; description of, 58; its 
parsonage and stable, 59; becomes a pri- 
vate house, 60; 147, Appendix I.; of 
1642 (in fort), 17, 58, note, 59, 109, 148. 
Church Lane, 57, 58, 59. 
City Tavern. -See Stadts Herbergh. 
Claaver Weytje, 275, 285, note, 295, 298. 
Claessen, Dirck, the potter, 345. 
Claessen, Sibout, 125, 126. 
Cleer, George, 341, 342. 
Cliff Street, 311, 317. 
Clock, Abraham Martensen, 222. 
Clopper, Cornells, 279, 302. 
Coenties Alley. See StadtHuys Lane. 
Coersen, Arent, 284. 
Coersen, Barent, 170. 
Cohn, or " Cawyn," Jacob, 86, note. 
Colve, Governor, 204 ; demolition of build- 
ings by, 274. 
Common Pasture, the Second, 4; the First, 
62. See also Schaapen Weide, 152. See 
271, note, 311, 330, 338. 



Company's Vly, the, 81. 

Coorn, Nicholas, 180, 238. 

Cornelissen, Albert, 301. 

Cornelissen, Dirck, 225, 239, 240, 242, 245, 

276, note, 341. 
Cornelissen, Lourens, skipper, 298, 299, 303. 
Cornelissen, Pieter (Timmerman),35 et seq., 

garden of, on Brouwer Straet, 35; his 

mill on Wessell's Creek, 36. 
Cornell, Rebecca, 196. 
Cornell, Sarah, marries Thomas Willet, 

193 ; marries Charles Bridges, 194. /See 

195. 
Cornell, Thomas, 193. 
Corstiaensen, Hendrick, 151. 
Cousseau, Jacques, 158, note. 
Cox, Alice, "alias Bono," 249. 
Cox, Sarah. See Bradley, Sarah. 
Cox, William, 249, 250, 251. 
Craie, Tennis, 82 et seq.; his houses on the 

Ditch, 84; sells house to the Jews, 86; 

his Long Island grant, 89; small house 

on Broad Street, 90. 
Cregier, Martin, Captain, 243. 
Croesens, Claas, 270, note. 
Custom House, first, of New York, 53. 
Cuville, or Cuvilje, Adriana, 300 ; marries 

Jan Damen, 307 ; her children, 307. 



Dacosta, Joseph, 86, note, 147. 
Damen, Jan Jansen, leases land of the 
West India Co., 9; wounds Philip Ge- 
raerdy, 11; trespasses of his cattle, 62. 
See 81. Shrovetide dinner at his house, 
102 ; visits the Netherlands and pur- 
chases the "Great Bouwery" for Stuy- 
vesant. 119, note; 148, 152, 240; the 
outhoek of his farm, 208, note, 271, 274, 
275, 285 ; association with Maryn Adri- 
aensen, 292, 295, 297; his brew'ery, 298; 
marriage to Adriana Cuville, 307. *See 
322, 324, 328. 

Danckers, Justus, view of New Amster- 
dam, 49, note. Appendix I., 129, 155. 

D'Andradi, Salvador, 86. 

Danielse, "Mother," Anneken, 270, note. 

Danker and Sluyter, the missionaries, 321; 
Journal of, 306. 

Danker and Sluj'ter, view of New Amster- 
dam, 55, 186, 189, 243, note, 335. 

Davidson, Joris. 124. note. 

Decker, Johan de, 42. 

De Foreest, Hendrick, 71. 

De Foreest, Isaac, buys old church, 59; his 
house, 71 et seq.; a pioneer of Harlem, 
72; his brewery, 73, 148. 

De Groot, Willem Pietersen, 345. 

De Koningh, Frederic, Capt., 179. 

De La Nov, Abraham, 178. 

Delavall, Thomas, 12, note. 

De Lucinn, Abraham, 80, note. 

De Meyer, Nicholas, 148, 170, 308. 

De Mever, William, 171. 

De Silfe, Nicasius, 151, 169. 

De Truv, Philip, 301, note; his house on 
East River shore, 326, 335, 339. 



INDEX 



359 



Deutel Bay, 83, note, 327. 

De Vos, Mathew, marries widow of Philip 

Geraerdy, 12 ; iiis land on Hoo{^h Straet, 

127. 
De Vries, David, Captain, his account of 

the massacre of the Indians at Pavonia, 

23; his grant on Staten Island, 97. 
Dickenson, Joanna, 125. 
Dillon, Daniel, attempts to burn \Vm. Pat- 

erson's house in New York, 202. 
Dircksen, Barent, 313, 314, note. 
Dircksen, Cornells, ferryman, 48, 6G, 242, 

244, 245, 340. 
Dirty Lane. See Slyck Steegh, 154. 
"Distelvink, Den," — poems of Jacob 

Steendam, 132 et seq. 
Ditch, the, 82, 83, 105, 323. 
Ditch of the Palisades, 274. 
Dock, the public, 73. 
Doeckles, Willem, 89. 
Dominicus, Reynier, 308. 
Dominie's Bouwery, the, 16. 
Dominie's Hoek, 16. 
Dongan, Governor, 245. 
Doughty, Francis, Rev., 219. 
Drisius, Dominie Samuel, his house, 49; 

land in the Sheep Pasture, 151. 
Duke's Street. See Hoogh Straet. 
Dutch Kills, the, 228. 
Du Trieux. See De Truy. 
Duyckink, Evert, the glassmaker, 158, 221. 
Duvtts, Laurens, 1G4. 
Dj'knian, Jan, 163. 
Dyre, William, 55. 



Easthampton. Long Island, descendants 

of Cornells Mel^-n at. See Appendix 

IL 
Ebel, Pieter, 181. 
Ellet's, or Elliott's Alley, 173. 
Elliott, Richard, 160, note, 173. 
Ellsworth, Stoffel, 65. 
Emott, James, 259. 
Enckhuysen, city of, in the 17th century, 

131. 
"English Quarter," the, 192. 
Evertsen, Wessell, the fisher, 171 et seq., 

199. 
Exchange Place. See Tuyn Straet. 



Fair Street. See Fulton Street. 

Felle, Simon, 150. 

Ferrj' to Long Island, 6, 49 ; leased by 
Captain Tomassen, 66; hamlet at, 319, 
339; establishment of, 340; Eghbert van 
Dorsum, ferry-master, 342. 

Fiscal, House of the, 33. 

"Five Houses," the. 5, 13, 31; confiscated 
by the English and demolished, 32; at- 
tachmenton, b}- George Baxter, 32, note. 

Fletcher, Benjamin, Colonel, Governor of 
New York, 253, 255. 

Dodder, Jacob. 272, 304, note. 

Forbus, Jan, 102. 

Forrester, Andrew, 93, note, 179. 



Fort Amsterdam, 5, 7, 182. 
"Fortune of New Netherland," ship con- 
fiscated by Stuyvesant's orders, 119, 178. 
Francen, Bout, 314, 315. 
Frera, David, 86, note. 
Fulton Street, 317, 324. 
Fyn, Francis, Capt., 167. 



Gabry, Pieter and Sons, of Amsterdam, 
53, 54, 284. 

Galnia. See Jansen, Sybrant. 

Garden Street. See Tuvn Straet. 

Garland, John, 197, 198." 

Geraerdy, Jan, 12, 

Geraerdy, Philip, keeps the White Horse 
Tavern, 7; accidentally wounded, 11; 
his later residence, 12, 63. 

Gerritsen, Adriaen, 178. 

Gerritsen, Philip, 178, 180. 

" Gideon," slave-ship, 42. 

Glazier Street, the, 233, note. 

Glen, Alexander. See Leendertsen, Sander. 

Golden Hill, 310. 

Gold Street, 271, note, 310. 

Goulder, William, 341, 342. 

Gouwenbergh, the, 297, 298, 310. 

Graham, James, Recorder, is mysteriously 
wounded, 318. 

" Great Bouwery," the, purchased by Di- 
rector Stuyvesant, 119, note. 

Great Tavern, the. See Stadts Herbergh. 

Great Tree, the, 325, 339. 

Green Lane, the, 297, note. 



Haes, Roeloff Jansen, 47. 

Haie, Jacob, 57, 162; burning of his farm- 
house, 169. See 323. 

Hall, Thomas, his house at " The Ferry," 
325 et seq. ; one of the first English set- 
tlers, 327; marries Anna Mitford, 327; 
prominent in New Amsterdam, 328, 337. 

Hanover Square, its associations, 223. See 
243, note, 244, Appendix I. 

Hardenbrook, Andries and Femmetje, 318, 
note. 

Harlem, earh' settlements at, 72, 108. 

Harpendinck, John, 316. 

Hartgers, Pieter, 80. 

Hartgers view of New Amsterdam, 2, note; 
155, note. 

Heathcote, George, 291. 

Heere Graft, 82, 123, 149. 

Heermans or Herrman, Augustyn, 50, 
note; warehouse of, 53; financial diffi- 
culties, 54; residence on East River, 281; 
his early life in Prague, 281 et seq.; 
enters Wallenstein's service, 283, 285; 
difficulties with Director Stuyvesant, 
287 ; deputized to visit the governor of 
Maryland, his journey, 288; his artistic 
talents, 288, note; his survey and map 
of Maryland, 289; manor of Bohemia, 
290; supposed artist of the " Vander- 
donck view of New Amsterdam," Ap- 
pendix I, 



360 



INDEX 



Hellekers, Jacob, 306, .321. 

Hendrickse, Trvntje, 300. 

Hendricksen, Claes, 208, 2(59, 276, 277. 

Hendricksen, Harmeu, 168. 

Herrman, Augustine. See Ileermans. 

Hewit, Raudel, 220. 

Hollar, Wenceslas, 288, note. 

Holmes, George, 14, 326, 327. 

Hooghlandt, Christopher, l'J8. 

Hoogh Straet, or High Street, its origin, 6, 

104; straightened, 123, 153, 176. 
Hoorn's Hoek, 126, note. 



Indians, massacre of Weckquaskeek 
tribe, 1643, 22; compensation to Mo- 
hawks for destruction of their house, 71 ; 
expedition against Raritans, 97; massa- 
cre of Weckquaskeeks, 103; devastate 
Staten Island in 1643, 104 ; their incur- 
sions of 1655, 165; destroy Achter Col, 
178; attack Allerton's warehouse, 336. 

Isolated plantations, order against, 169. 

Israel, David, 86, note. 



Jacobs, Magdalentje, 148. 

Jacobsen, Cornells, 313, 314, 315. 

Jacobsen, Jan, 180. 

Jacobsen, Rutger, 172 et seq. 

Janse, Annetje, wife of Roeloff Jaasen, 

and of Dominie Bogardus, 14 et seq.; 

spends her latter years at Albany, 29. 

See 46. 
Janse, Ariaentje, marries Govert Loocker- 

mans, 237 ; her death, 241. 
Janse, Hester, 146. 
Janse, Marritje, 239, 240 ; her will, slaves, 

etc., 241, note; marries Govert Loocker- 

mans, 241; previous marriage to Dirck 

Cornelissen, 242. -S'ee 245, note, 276. 
Jansen, Antony van Salee, 146. 
Jansen, Antony van Vees, 313. 
Jansen, Barent, 161, 162. 
Jansen, Carsten, 158, note. 
Jansen, Cornells, 159, note. 
Jansen, Harmanus, 270, note. 
Jansen, Hendrick, baker, 14. 
Jansen, Hendrick, tailor, sails on the 

" Princess," 27 ; house on Hoogh Straet, 

225, 229; animosity towards Kieft, 229; 

lined and banished, 230; his widow, 277 ; 

land on East River, 279 et seq.. 285. 
Jansen, Jan van St. Obin. See St. Obin. 
.Jansen, Michiel, 232, note. 
Jansen, Fieter, 280. 
Jansen, Fieter, Noorman, 102. 
Jansen, Roeloff, 15. 
Jansen, Sybrant, Galma, 128. 
Jansen, Tvmen, 241, 268, note; 271, mnster 

ship carpenter of West India Co., 275 

et seq. 
Jansen, Willeni, 121. 
Jessup, Edward, 193. 
Jews' Lane, the, 155, note. 
Jews, the, in New Amsterdam, 84 et seq. 

87, synagogue of, 87, note, 160. 



Jochemsen, Andries, his tavern, 268, 269. 

Jonas, " Tryn," mother of Annetje Janse 
Bogardus, 15. 

Jorissen, Burger, his first house on Hoogh 
Straet, 104, 105, 128, note, 128; his lane 
to the river. Burger's Fath, 222, 224; 
Burger's smithy, 225, 230; early home, 
226; comes to New Amsterdam, 227; his 
plantation on the Dutch Kills, 228. See 
229. Buys Hendrick Jansen's house, 
230; troubles with the authorities of 
New Amsterdam, 231; his mill and 
sluice, 231, 232; new dwelling, 232; re- 
moves to Long Island, 233, 285. 



Kerfbyl, Johannes, Dr., 159, 160. 

Kidd, Sarah. <See Bradley, Sarah. 

Kidd, William, Captain, marriage to Sarah 
Oort, 251; residence in New York, 251; 
modern views respecting, 262; selected 
to operate against the pirates, 253; his 
commission, and partners in the English 
administration, 254; his picked crew 
impresFed in England, 254; crew filled 
out at New York, 255 ; mutiny and kill- 
ing of William Moore, 255, 256, note; 
alleged piratical depredations, 257; crew 
breaks up and he reaches West Indies, 
258; efforts to secure pardon from 
government, 259; arrested and sent to 
England, 200; course of the English ad- 
ministration, 261; his so-called "trials" 
for murder and piracy, 261 et seq.] 
counsel refused to him, 263; his execu- 
tion and confiscation of his effects, 265. 

Kieft, Willem, Director-General, his 
character, 22: his Indian policj% p. 22 
et seq. ; quarrel with Dominie Bogar- 
dus, 24 tt seq. ; drowned in wreck of 
the ''Princess," 29; views of Hendrick 
Kip respecting, 37 ; at Hans Kiersted's 
wedding, 59, 91; expedition against 
Raritan Indians, 97. See 98 ; designs 
against the Indians, 99; his propositions 
to the community, 100; dissolves the 
Committee of Twelve, 102; at the dinner 
at Damen's house, 103; his pamphlet of 
vindication, 106 ; annoys Cornells Melyn, 
107; confiscates Seger Teunissen's prop- 
erty, 107 ; surrenders his office to Stuy- 
vesant, 109; denounced by Melyn and 
Kuyter, 110; criminal charges against 
Melyn and Kuyter, 111; asks forgive- 
ness in wreck of "Princess," 113, 227; 
troubles with Hendrick Jansen, 229, 230 ; 
his apology for the Indian massacre, 
293; assaulted bv Marj-n Adriaeusen, 
294, 299. 

Kiersted, Dr. Hans, 45 et seq. ; his mar- 
riage, 59, 63; at Dominie Bogardus's 
party, 180. 

Kiersted, Hans, Jr., 244. 

Kiersted, Jochem, 46, 194. 

" Kint-in-'t- Water." See Pietersen, Hen- 
drick. 

Kip, Hendrick Hendricksen, the tailor, 



INDEX 



361 



36 et seq.; refuses advice to Director 
Kicftaud his Council, 38; is one of " The 
Nine Men," 39. 

Kip, Isaac, 40, 277, 320. 

Kip, Jacob, 36; his house, 40. 

Kip's Bay, 41. 

Klein, Uldrich, 63. 

Kock, Pieter, tavern on Marckveldt, 10. 

Kulck and Kolck Hoek, 330, 339, 346. 

Kolck, the little, 4. 

" Koopal." See Stilman, Jan Hendricksen. 

Koorn. See Coorn. 

Kiinst, Jan Barentsen, 162. 

Kuyter, Jocheiu Pietersen, Capt., 107 et 
seq.; his bouwery of Zegendaal, 108; 
bouwery destroyed by the Indians, 101* ; 
brings charges against Kieft, 110; pro- 
secuted by Kieft, fined and banished, 
111; escapes from the wreck of the 
"Princess," 113; appeals to States- 
General, 114. See 115. Makes his peace 
with Stuyvesant, 120; murdered at Har- 
lem, 121, 164. 



Labadists. See Danker and Sluyter. 

Labatie, or Labbate, Jan, 71. 

La Chair, Solomon Pietersen, the notary, 
his tavern, 87 et seq. ; later house, 218, 
note. 

"La Garce," privateer, 41, 54, 69. 

Land Poort, the, 273, 274. 

Lawrence, John, 295, 337. 

Leendertsen, Cornells, business associate 
of Govert Loockermans, 237, 239, 276, 
311, note, 335, 339, 341. 

Leendertsen, Sander, 302; his house in the 
Smits Vly, 303; lands at Schenectady, 
304. 

Leisler, Elsie. See Elsie Tj-mense. See 
245, 247, 248. 

Leisler, Jacob, 242, 245. See 245 et seq.; 
his execution for treason, 247. 

Leisler, Jacob, Jr., 248. 

Levy, Asher, 85, 86, note. 

Lewis, Thomas, 233. 

Lindsay, Alexander. See Leendertsen, 
Sander. 

Litscho, Sergeant Daniel, his tavern, 10, 
225, 267, 270, note. 272, 276, 277, 278. 

Livingston, Robert, 253, 254. 

"Long Mary," 301, note. 

Loockermans, Anneken, 237, note, 246. 

Loockermans, Govert, 47, 76, 129; his 
house on Iloogh Straet, 146, 148; buys 
old bark mill, 158; house on river shore, 
225; his early life, 23G; his name, 237; 
marriage at Amsterdam, 237; a leading 
trader, 238; affair of Nicholas Koorn, 
238; his landed possessions, 239; his 
mansion on the East River, 240: marries 
Marritje Janse, 241; his family, 241, 
242; his shore front, 243; death of, 244, 
267, 208, note, 276; lane skirting his 
bouwery, 311. note; his East River 
bouwery, 330; business associations with 
Isaac Allerton, 335, 337; description of 



East River bouwery, 339, 342, 343, 
345. See Appendix "ll. 

Loockermans, Jacob, 242; becomes a sur- 
geon, and resident of Maryland, 244; 
conveys his estate in New York to Jacob 
Leisler, 245. 

Loockermans, Jannetje, 241 ; marries Hans 
Kiersted, Jr., 244. 

Loockermans. Marritje, 241; marries Bal- 
thazar Bayard, 244, 246. 

Loper, Jacob, Capt., marries Cornelia 
Melyn, 113, 116, 122, 124. 

Loper, Jacob (2d) or James, 124, note. 
iSee Appendix 11. 

Lourensen, Jan, 269, 270. 

Lourenseu, Pieter, 59. 

Lovelace, Governor, house plundered by 
the Dutch, 14; his tavern, 188. 

Lowry, John and Catharine, 318, note. 

Lubbertsen, Frederik, his house in the 
Smits Vly, 299 ; his Long Island land, 
300, 301. 

Luersen, Carsten, 316. 

Luyster's Island, 228. 



Maagde Paetje. 229, 280, note, 296, 297; 
regulation of 1641, 298, 310. 

Maiden Lane. See Maagde Paetje. 

Mans, Engeltje, 227, 234. 

Mansveld, the Buccaneer, 210. 

Mrrius, Pieter Jacobsen, 147. 

Markettield Street, 77. 

Martense, Lj'ntje, wife of Adam Roelant- 
sen, 63. 

Marynsen, Tys, 295. 

Melyn, Cornelia, daughter of Comelis, 
marries Capt. Jacob Loper, 113; marries 
for her second husband Jacob Schellin- 
ger, 122; her son Abraham Schellinger, 
159. See Appendix II. 

Melyn, Cornells, of Antwerp, 94 et seq. ; 
receives grant of Staten Island, 96; his 
colony, 98 ; at the head of the Commit- 
tee of Twelve at New Amsterdam, 100; 
petitions for popular representation in 
government affairs, 101 ; colony on 
Staten Island devastated by the Indians 
in 1643, 104; his grant of land in New 
Amsterdam, and house, 106 ; memorial 
of "The Eight Men," to West India 
Co., 105; supposed to be author of 
memorial of 1644 denouncing Kieft, 
106; his annoyances by Kieft, 107; 
brings charges against Kieft, 110 ; pro- 
Sf'cnted by Kieft, fined and banished, 
11) ; sails for Europe in the " Princess," 
and escapes from the wreck, 113; ap- 
peals to States-General, 114; serves 
mandamus of the States-General on 
Stuyvesant, 116; joins in the " Ver- 
toogh," or "Remonstrance" of Vander 
Donck, and returns to the Netlierlands, 
116; his association with the Baron van 
der Capellen, 118; his residence on 
Staten Island. 120; imprisoned in New 
Amsterdam, 121; made captive by the 



362 



INDEX 



Indians and plantation on Staten Island 
a^caiu destroyed, 121; takes oath of alle- 
giance to the English at New Haven, 
122; surrenders patrooiiship of Staten 
Island, 122; suit against Claessen, 125. 
See 127, 128, transactions with Richard 
Smith, 220, note; his house, etc., See 
Appendix I., II. 

Melyn, Isaac, 124. See Appendix II. 

Melyn, Jacob, son of Cornells, 122, 124, 
159. See Appendix II. 

Melyn, Jannetje, wife of Cornells, 116, 122, 
124. See Appendix II. 

Mespat Kill, 168, 228. 

Meyer. See De Meyer. 

Michaelis, Jonas, Dominie, 156 et seq. 

Michielsen, Gerloff, 2"J5. 

Milborne, Jacob, execution for treason, 247. 

Mill Lane. See Slvck Steegh, 153, 173, 
233, note. 

Mitford, Anna, wife of Thomas Hall, 327, 
328. 

Jlolemaecker, Francois, 155. 

Moll, Abraham Lambertsen, 305. 

Moll, Lambert Huybertsen, 319 et seq.; 
his Long Island lands, 320, note. 

Jlontagne, Johannes de la, 40, 187, 315. 

Montanus View of New Amsterdam, Ap- 
pendix I. 

Moore, Anthony, 298. 

Moore, Thomas, 42. 

Moore, William, killing of, 255, 256, note. 

Morgan, Henry, 210. 



Nagel farmhouse and burial-ground 

King's Bridge, 163. 
Nagel, Jan, 162. 

Nagel, Jeuriaen Jansen, 163, note. 
Nassau Street. See Fulton Street. 
Negro slaves at N. Amsterdam, 9, 42. 
Nevius, Johannes, 48, 177, note. 
Newton, Henry, 198. 
Newtown, Doiighty's patent of, 219. 
Newtown Creek. See Mespat Kill. 
Nicholson, Lieut.-Governor, 240, 250. 
" Nine Men," the, 76, 243, 287. 
Noering, Jan Willeniseu, 171. 
Normans Kill, 169, 323. 
Norwood, Benjamin and Cornelia, 318, 

note. 
Nutten or Governor's Island, 5, 152. 



Old Kill, the, 338, 341. 

Oort, John, 250, 251. 

Oort, Sarah. See Bradley, Sarah. 

Opdvke, Gvsbert, 180. 

Orange Street. See Cliff Street. 

" Orchard," the, 318. 

Oude Kerk, or Old Church, Amsterdam, 

156. 
"Outhoek," the, 208, 271. 



Pack Huys. See Storehouse of the West 
India Co. 



Paine, John, Capt., 291. 

Palisades of 1053, the, 272, et seq. 

Park Bow, its origin, 4. 

Parsonage of Dutch Church, 16, 59. 

Paterson, William, appearance in New 
York, 196; his houses in New York, 197, 
note; diiiiculties with the mayor and 
aldermen, 197; sued by the court mar- 
shal, 198; expedition to Albany, 199; 
affray with Captain Baker, 199 'to 203; 
attempt to burn his house in New York, 
202 ; award in his favor against Baker, 
203; returns to Scotland, 203; propertj- 
confiscated by Gov. Col ve, 204; executes 
releases, 205 ; early life of William Pat- 
erson founder of the Bank of England, 
205 et seq.; alleged statement of age in 
his will, 207; his financial theories, 208; 
his visit to the West Indies, 209; suffers 
in the persecution of the Scottish Pres- 
byterians, 212 ; comparison of signatures, 
2i5; visits New York, 218, note. 

Paulussen, Mighiel, 147. 

Pavonia, Massacre of Indians at, 23. 

Pearl Street. See 't Water. 

Peartree, William, See Bartre. 

Peck Slip, 335. 

Peeck, Jan, 301, 302, 345. 

Peeck, Mary, banished from New Amster- 
dam, 301, 302. 

Penoyer, Robert, 294. 

Petersen, Lourens, 150. 

Phillipse, Frederic, 12, note, 78, _, 

Picet. See Picquet. 

Picquet, Michiel, 83, 90; put to the torture, 
91 et seq. 

Pietersen, Abraham, miller, 346. 

Pietersen, Adolph, 127, 

Pietersen, Albert, 150, 

Pietersen, Cornells, 300. 

Pietersen, Gillis, 221, 230, 277. 

Pietersen, Hendrick van Hasselt, 330, 
341. 

Pietersen, Jan van Amsterdam, 83. 

Pietersen, Willem. See De Groot. 

Pieters, Solomon, 86, note. 

Pine Street. See Tienhoven Street. 

PoUet, Marie, wife of Philip Geraerdy, 8; 
marries Mathew de Vos, 12. 

Pos, Adriaen, Capt., 122. 

Pos, Simon Dircksen, lost on the "Prin- 
cess," 27. 

Potter, Cornells de, 48, 

Potter, Elizabeth de, 49, 

Prague, city of, and the Thirty' I'^ears War, 
281 et seq. 

"Princess," ship, 27; M'recked on the 
coast of Wales, 28, 113, 114, 

Prinsen Straet, 73, 150. 

Providence, Island of, 210, 

Provoost, David, 338, 339, 

Puddington, Ellas, 320. 



" QuEDAGH," merchant, capture of, 257, 

265. 
Quick, William, 327. 



INDEX 



363 



Rapfalje, Joris, 147, 307, note. 

Reddinliaus, Ebcn, 104, 105, 107. 

Reynhoutsen, Reynhout, 240. 

Rider's Alley, 311. 

Robinson, John, 248. 

Roelantsen, Adam, schoolmaster, Gl et seq. ; 

visits the Netherlands, (>3; banishment, 

64; is provoost or jailer, 65. 
RoelofEse, Sara, daughter of Annetje Janse, 

marriage to Dr. Kiersted, 46, 59. 
Root, Simon, 187. 
Ron, Louis, Rey., grant of escheated land 

to him, 160, note. 
Rousby, Christopher, 266. 
Rousby, Sarah. See Bradley, Sarah. 
Rust, Claes Janscn, 66. 
Ruyter, Claes de, 167, 168, 169. 
Rycken, Abraham, S.J, 150. 
Rycken, Hendrick, 316. 



Samsens, Geertruyd, 170. 

Schaapen Weide, or Sheep Pasture, 4, 

note. See also "Common Pasture," 150, 

151, 152, 271, note. 
Schabanck, Pieter, 86. 
Scheerenborgh, Tryntje, 277. 
Schellinger, Abraham, 159. Appendix II. 
Schollinger, .lacob, marries Cornelia Mel3'n, 

122. 'See 123, Appendix II. 
Schenectady massacre, Glenn mansion, 

etc., 304,"305. 
Schoorsteenveger. See Andriessen, Pieter. 
Schreyers Hoek, 19, 73, 109; general gath- 
ering of Indians and treaty at, 162, note. 
Schrick, Paulus, 71. 
Schutt, Cornells, 47. 
Sebrah, Clement, 158, note. 
Sebring, Cornells, 301, note. 
Seutter yiew of New Amsterdam, 244, 

note, 280, 286. 
Shirt Case, the, 182. 
Shoemakers' Pasture, the, 316. 
" Shrovetide Dinner," the, 102. 
Siinonse, Hendrickje, 158. 
Slangh, Jacob, killed in the fort, 294. 
Slaughter Houses, the, 275. 
Sloat Lane. See Sloot. 
Sloot, and Sloot Lane, 241, 243. 
Slot, Jan Janseii, 291. 
Sloughter, Governor, 246. 
Slvck Steegh, the, 151; in Amsterdam, 

153; called Dirty Lane, 154, 155, 158, 

160, note. 173, '233, note, 271, note, 

285. 
Smedes, Jan, 2.33, note, 316. 
Smeeman, Ilarman, 314, note. 
Smith, .lames, 69. 
Smith, Richard, 218 et seq. 
Smith, Richard, junior, 220. 
Smith's Island, 219. 
Smith Street, 153. 2.3.3.285. 
Smith, William Peart n-e, 270, note. 
Smits Vly, small gate in palisades at, 274; 

descrip'tion of, 279, 299, 306, 325. 
Soulh William Street. See Slvck Steegh. 
Stadt Iluys, 88, 126, 129. See' also Stadts 



Herbergh; meeting of delegates at, 183; 
municipal government installed at, 184; 
granted to city, 185; shore front im- 
proved, 185; views of, 186; dinner to 
Stuyvesant at, 186; used for storage 
purposes, 187; desired for school, 187; 
courts in, 188; building becomes dilap- 
idated and is sold, 189. 

Stadt Huys Lane, 176. 

Stadts Herbergh, 88, 104; of Amsterdam, 
176; of New Amsterdam, 176 et seq. 
See also Stadt Huys ; dimensions, garden, 
etc., 177; first landlord, historic inci- 
dents, etc., 178; used as place of deten- 
tion, 178; festivities at, 180; affrays at, 
181; courts held at, 182. See 187. 

Staten Island, grant to Cornells Melyn, 
96; Baron Van der Capellen's interest 
in, 118; devastated bv the Indians in 
164.3, 104; again in 1655, 127; Melyn 
surrenders patroonship, 122. 

States-General of the Netherlands, Melyn 
and Kiiyter before, 114; charges against 
the West India Company before, 119, 
note. 

Steendam, Jacob, the poet, 128 et seq. ; 
birthplace of, 131; in service of West 
India Company, 132; his poems, "Den 
Distelvink," 132; life in Africa, 136; 
arrives at New Amsterdam, 136; poems 
on New Netherland, 137 ; leaves for 
Holland, 141; his life at Batavia, 142. 

Stevenson, Jan, schoolmaster, 63. 

Stevensen, Joris do Caper, 167, 168. 

Stevenson, Thomas, 345. 

St. George Tavern, 304. 

Stille, Cornelis Jacobsen. See Jacobsen, 
Cornells. 

Sti Iman, Jan Hendricksen, called " Koopal," 
221, ,324. 

Stilwell, Nicholas, 326. 

St. Obin, Jan Jansen van, 41 et seq. 

Stone Street. See Brouwer Straet, and 
Hoogh Straet; small house on, 90, note. 

Storehouse of West India Company, 18, 
45; new storehouse, 52; Oloff van Cort- 
landt is keeper, 76. See Appendix I. 

Stoutenburgh, Pieter, 57. 

Straetmaker, Dirck, and wife, killed by 
Indians, 193. 

Stuyvesant, Petrus, Director-General, house 
on Schreyers Hoek, 20, 42, 47, 50; in 
awe of Captain Van der Grift, 51 ; his 
unpopularity, 74; grant of the "Great 
Bouwery," 83, note, 85, 91; his hypoc- 
risy on trial of Picquct, 92; arrival at 
New Amsterdam, 109; hatred of Melyn 
and Kuyter, 110; fines and banishes 
Melyn and Kuyter, 111; his judgments 
suspended by the States-General, 116; 
sends Secretary Van Tienhoven to the 
Netherlands, 116; purchases the " Great 
I'.ouwery," 119, note; confiscates the 
ship" Fortune," and Jlelvn's property in 
New Amsterdam, 120, 125, 148, 169"; at 
the meeting of delegates. 183; dinner to, 
at Stadt liuys, 186; 194, 242,244, 286, 



364 



INDEX 



287; his deputation to the Governor of 

Maryland, 288. 
Stymetz, Caspar, 14. 
Sunswick Creek, 165. 
"Swamp, The," 325, 331, 337, 338, 330, 

340. 
Swits, Claes Cornelissen, 69 ; murder of 

b}- Indians, 98. 
Syboutsen, Harck, 314, note. 
Synagogue of Jews, 87, note, 160. 

"Tabasco," Spanish ship, affair of, 70. 

Tan pits, the, 316. 

Taylor, William, 203, note. 

Ten Eyck, Coenrad, 316. 

Teunissen, Aert, 126, note. 

Teunissen, Gysbtirt, 164. 

Teunissen, RoelofE, Captain, 323, 324. 

Teunissen, Seger, 107. 

Theobalds, John, 249, note. 

Thirty Years' War, the, its part in the 
colonization of New Netherland, 225. 

Tienhovcn Street, 285, note. 

Tomasseii, Willem, or "lelmer," Captain, 
66 et seq., 340. 

Trinity Church, 272, 273, 274. 

Trinity Church Yard, 107. 

Tuder, John, 250. 

Tuvn Straet, 151. 

'"Twelve Men," the, 100. 

Tymense, Elsie, 242; marries Pieter Cor- 
nelissen Vanderveen, 242; marries Jacob 
Leisler, 242. See Leisler, Elsie, 276. 

Tysen, Jacob, 65. 

Tvssens, Lvsbet, wife of Maryn Adriaen- 
"sen, 291, "294, 295. 

Underhill, .John, Captain, 180. 

Van Borsum, Cornelis, 149. 

Van Borsum, P^ghbert, 115; his house at 
the Ferry, 342, 343. 

Van Brugge, Carel, 151. See also Bridges, 
Charles. 

Van Brugh, Johannes, 149. 

Van Commel, Teunis Jansen, 168, 169. 

Van Cortlandt, Catharine, her church at 
Sleepy Hollow, 78. 

Van Cortlandt, Oloff Stevenseii, suit 
against Dominie Bogardiis for slander, 
26 ; 57, 64 ; comes to New Amsterdam 
75 et seq. ; marries Anneken Loocker- 
mans, 76; his brewery, 77; burgo- 
master of the citj', 78; his familv, 79; 
89, 149, 237. 

Van Cortlandt, Stephanns, 246. 

Van Couwenhoven, Gerrit Woiphertscn, 
144. 145. 

Van Couwenhovpn, Jacob Wolphertsen, 
buj's old church, 59; his family, 144, 
et seq.; his speculations, 146; his brew- 
ery, 147; pecuniary embarrassments, 148, 
149, 151 ; his stone house on Hoogh Straet, 
170. 

Van Couwenhoven, Pieter "Wolphertsen, 



his houses on Stone Street, 79 : family, 
144; 148. 

Van Couwenhoven, Wolphert Gerritsen, 
144, 145, note. 

Van Curler, Arent, 269. 

Vander Bogaerdt, Harmanus Meyndertsen, 
surgeon of West India Co., 11, 68, et 
seq.; tragical death of, 71. 

Vander Capellen, Henryk, enters into 
partnersliip with Cornelis Melyn, 118; 
sues the West India Company for seiz- 
ure of his ship, 120, 178. 

Vanderclvff, Dirck Jansen, 317. 

Vanderclyff, Geesje, 317, 318. 

Vanderclyffs Street. See Cliff Street. 

Vander Donck, Adriaen, his " Vertoogh " 
or " Remonstrance," to the States-Gen- 
eral, 51, 116, 287. 

Vander Donck, View of New Amsterdam, 
50, note. Appendix I. 

Vander Grift, Jacob Leer.dertscn, 50, 300, 

Vander Grift, Paulus Leendertsen, 47; his 
warehouse, 50 et seq., 54, 337. 

Vanderveen, Pieter ('ornelissen, 242. 

Vandcrvin, Hendrick Jansen, 121. 

Vanderwel, Lourens Cornelissen. See 
Cornelissen, Lourens. 

Vandewater, Hendrick, 149, 305. 

Van Dyke, Hendrick, assault on, 11 ; his 
festivities at the Tavern, 65 ; 171. 

Van Geele, Maximilian, 14. 

Van Hardenbergh, Arnoldus, 79. 

Van Hardenbergh, Johannes, 80. 

Van Hol)oken, Harmanus, 187. 

Van Holsteyn, Nicholas. See De Meyer. 

Van Hoorn, Jan Cornelissen, 141. 

Van Inibroeck, Gysbert, 86. 

Van Neck, Lambert Aelberts, 200, note. 

Van Euyven, Cornelis, 32, note, 137. 

Van Steenwyck, Abraham Jacobsen, 46. 

Van Steenwyck, Cornelis Jacobsen, 46 et 
seq. ; burgomaster and mavor, 48, 49, 198, 
203. 

Van Tienhoven, Aefje, marries Pieter 
Stoutenburgh, 57. 

Van Tienhoven, Cornelis, Secretary, his 
character, 55; his residence, 57. See 77; 
leads expedition against Karitan Indians, 
97; at the " Shrove-tide Dinner," 103; 
sent by Stuyvesant to the Netherlands, 
116 ; his defiance of the States-General, 
119, note; his land on Hoogh Straet, 128; 
on the sheep pasture, 151; grudges 
against August}'!! Heeniians, 287, 203, 
208; his land in" Sniits Vly, 306; marries 
Rachel Vinje, 307 ; house on East River 
Shore, 308; his bouwery of " Wallen- 
stein," and lane, 309 et seq.; his patro- 
nvmic, 313, note ; leases his bouwerv, 
314, 315; sale of the bouwery, 316. See 
319, 339. 

Van Tienhoven, .Tannetje, daughter of the 
Secretary, 57, 58. 

Van Tienhoven, Lucas, 57, 58. 

Van Tieiihoven's Lane, 310 et seq.; regu- 
lated in 1642, 311, note, 271, note, 330. 

Van Twiller, Woutei-, Director-General, 



INDEX 



365 



his landed interests, 76. See 236, 275; 
tobacco plantations, 327. 

Varrevanger, Jacob, 57, 128. 

Verbrugf^e, Gillis, 237. 

Verdon, Magdalena, 24. 

Verlett, Janneken, marries Augustyn 
Heerm.ins, 285. 

Verlett, Nicholaes, 285. 

Verplanck, Abraham Isaacsen, at the 
" Shrove-tide Dinner," 103. See 319, 
324 

Versche "Water. See Kolck, 338, 346. 

Views of New Amsterdam. See under 
Hartgers, Danckers, Danker and Sluy- 
ter, Visscher, Vander Donck, Allaerdt, 
Sentter, Moiitanus, etc. 

Vincent, Adriaen, 150. 

Vinje, Jan, his brewery on the Maagde 
P'aetje, 298; on the East River, 306; sup- 
posed to be the first born in New Neth- 
erland of European parentage, 306, 307, 
308. 

Vinje, Eachel, marries Secretary Van 
Tienhoven, 57, 307. 

Vinje, Willeni (or Vigne), 306; his chil- 
dren, 307, 322, 324. 

Visscher View of New Amsterdam, 49, 
note, 59, 288, note. 

Vogelsang, Marcus Hendricksen, 232. 

Volckertsen, Cornells, 322. See 301, note. 

Volckertsen, Dirck, 162, 240, 267, 268, 
notes; his house near tlie ferry, 319, 32!; 
one of the earliest settlers, 322; marries 
Christina Vinje, 322; his lands at the 
Normans Kill, 323. 



Waal, or sheet-piling along river, 126, 
278. 

Waldron, Resolved, 43, 163 ; sent on depu- 
tation to Maryland, 288. 

" Wallenstein," bouwerv of, 312, et sea., 
310. 

Wallenstein, Count, 283. 



Wall Street. See Palisades of 1653. 

Wansaer, Jan, 41. 

Water, 't, 45 et seq. 

Water Pooi't, the, 273, 274. 

Webb, James, his tavern, 304. 

Weigh House, the, 73. 

Wessells, Jochem, of Albany, 199. 

Wessells, Warner, 29. 

Westchester Colonists, their arrest, 179. 

West India Company, its records, 1 ; its 
bouwerys, 3 ; workshops, 5, 31 ; garrison, 
10; storehouse, 18, 52; its colonial ofli- 
cers, 21; brewery of, 34; Pack Huts or 
Custom House, 52; the great bouwery 
of, 83, note; memorial of the "eight 
men " to, 105; malignant feeling of di- 
rectors towards Cornells Melyn,114,note; 
attacked by the ''Remonstrance" of 
Van der Donck, 116 ; answer before the 
States-General, 117; sued by Baron Van 
der Capellen for Stuvvesant's acts, 120; 
builds City Tavern, '176; barn of, 182; 
grant of municipal government, 184; 
hires Van Tienhoven's garden, 310. 

White Hall, the, 20. 

Whitehall .Street, Appendix I. 

White Horse Tavern, 7 etseq.; affrav at, 
II, 61. 

Willemsen, Hendrick, baker, 93, 317. 

WlUemsen, Rynier, 126, note. 

William Stree't. See Smith Street, 233. 

Willet, Thomas, at Dominie Bogardus's 
part}', 180; his grant next the Great 
Tavern, 192; marries Sarah Cornell, 193. 

Willet, Thomas (2d), 195. 

Willet, Captain Thomas, 51, 192, 305. 

Willet, William, 195. 

Winckel Straet, 13 ei seq.; closed in 1680, 
32, 72. 

Windmill on Nutten Island, 5; near the 
fort, 7. See 155, note. 

Withart, Johannes, 174. 

Wolphert Gerritsen's Vly, 338, 341, 346, 

Woolsej^ George, 195, 196, 335, 336, 337. 



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